Category: Healthcare

health apps - guidance tools for robust design

6/2/2018

When we recently asked "who tames a global healthbot", we touched on the iceberg of Software as a Medical Device and the need to balance effective regulation with commercial imperatives like the rate of capital burn for startups looking to bring a new product to market. Since we're also on a product development journey for CleanM8 - a clinical toolkit for supporting recovery journeys - we're going to take a moment to share some effective tools that help shape your design and compliance focus.

We reference these in our work delivering events like HackingHealthTech and startup acceleration programs with Slingshot, but share them to help grow local capability for DigitalHealth innovation and export market potential.

Staying local - Australian guidance
http://accan.org.au/files/Grants/PeaceofMind/index.html is a guidance tool developed in 2017 by University of Sydney researchers to help understand privacy, security, consumer protection, financial and therapeutic goods compliance. It's a simple, fast and effective tool for working out your minimum regulatory obligations.

Looking to the USA - FTC coverage
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/mobile-health-apps-interactive-tool is a useful tool published in April 2016 for navigating the more complex US healthcare environment, HIPAA, data breach obligations but would benefit from updated guidance about the impacts of imminent EU GPDR obligations that start in May 2018 (see www.wired.co.uk/article/what-is-gdpr-uk-eu-legislation-compliance-summary-fines-2018)

Design for Transparency and IP Defence
We're seeing some really good thinking coming out of the Turing Institute in the UK, touching on why algorithm driven interventions need capacity for forensic oversight + audit, whilst also being mindful of the need to protect IP rights of the algorithm developers. Highly recommend following their work.

Interesting @WiredUK article by @turinginst Fellow Prof. Jon Crowcroft on how differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, and #GDPR could help #consumers wrestle back control of their personal information https://t.co/sYMFuqgh70
— The Turing (@turinginst) February 5, 2018

Check out my new paper w/@b_mittelstadt and Chris Russell on how to offer 'counterfactual explanations' for AI based decisions without opening the black box and to create explainable and accountable AI https://t.co/VzDHihL6Cn @oiioxford @turinginst @oxfordethicslab #aiethics
— Sandra Wachter (@SandraWachter5) January 8, 2018

See @turinginst Fellow @tforcworc's article on #GDPR and the use of differential privacy, homomorphic encryption and 'edge cloud' approaches to ensure companies use citizens' data in a privacy-preserving way https://t.co/gGQIUSvRzj
— Helena Quinn (@h_s_quinn) February 5, 2018

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Incubating hunter-based healthtech talent for global impact

17/9/2017

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a 20hr digital health rapid prototyping challenge

Laughing Mind, with the support of University of Newcastles I2N Program, ran a HealthTech focussed innovation event at Three76Hub to tackle three event challenge topics. These included:

HackCare to transform Palliative + end of Life Care
HackMyCondition for Chronic Disease Management
HackLoneliness for better Mental Health care and connectedness

This venture catalyst event was designed to give early career exposure and cross-disciplinary team experiences to ICT, Design, Business and Health students, informed and shaped by experienced clinicians, consumers and carers on contemporary healthcare issues. Their challenge was to design + develop technical prototypes or outline a concept to address a healthcare problem with targeted use of contemporary technology, in a very short 20hr timeframe.

Image: Group photo of winning team of #HHT17UoN

With the winning team of #HHT17UoN

Our event winners

The contest of ideas amongst 7 teams saw three winners emerge from a high quality series of concept pitches:

First Place: $3000 to Team FeedbackLoop for their iCare4u platform, designed to close the feedback loop that is needed after a patient leaves their clinical appointments, helping physicians understand the efficacy of their prescribed treatment. This pharmacist led team of 7 developed a prototype that helps doctors receive patients' feedback regularly and provides them with treatment data and outcomes to improve their decision making.
Check it out at devpost.com/software/icare4u

Second Place: $2000 for Team Medius for their focus on addressing common root cause elements of the majority of chronic diseases with an app designed to increase the chances of healthy habit development by simple risk reporting and healthy behaviour tracking. With the Hunter region experiencing above average rates of overweight and obesity issues, their concept provides motivational elements to enhance the prospect of regular data tracking, reporting and behavioural change.
Check it out at devpost.com/software/medius-orl751

Third Place: $1000 to "Diamond Jim and the Celestial Four" - their Shedd App aims to "reduce loneliness, depression and suicide in young blokes by using Netflix's algorithm to match you with other nearby blokes who are interested in the same stuff as you". This was a great #menshealth focussed entry which has high relevance for its target audience and works to #hackloneliness - There's already expressions of interest evident for connecting them in with groups like SoldierOn.
Check it out at devpost.com/software/shedd

What a great crowd for #HHT17UoN Clinicians, coders, carers, students, PhDs + Uni staff. Thx for opening address @sallywaichichan pic.twitter.com/hNqQMAKrZn
— laughingmind (@laughingmind) September 15, 2017

positioning the hunter as a healthtech development centre

In wrapping up the event, Brian Hill, Founder of Laughing Mind, noted:

At a hackathon, people come together and use technology to transform ideas into reality. We've been working in this region over the last 4years to help connect the right elements together that position the Hunter as a regionally relevant Digital Health product development centre, testing and refining our venture catalyst event format. The ecosystem has all the right elements: strong Faculties of Health, Design, ICT & Business at UoN; an appetite for innovation and a growing capacity to nurture the next generation of entrepreneurs, with strong connectivity to regional audiences, places and population health needs.

As a UoN Healthcare Alumni who's had a chance to work on national and international digital health projects, I'm so excited by the quality we've seen in our 2017 event - the concepts presented address large healthcare market problems and the winners could be good candidates for an Accelerator program. We had the perfect mentor helping teams understand the value of focus and relevance - Jennifer Holland from Throatscope has been through the SharkTank journey and now has her product being distributed in 150 countries, so we were delighted to have her onboard. I think we're seeing the next generation of talent emerge that can make a real difference in Digital Health product development and we'll be working hard to build support for them to take the next steps in their journey. Prizemoney from our event is designed to help kickstart that process, but we'll be working with groups like TheHealthHorizon to ensure our region gets onto the map as a serious contender for HealthTech startups.

The event social surface can be seen in more detail using the hashtag #HHT17UoN. Planning is now underway for a 2018 event, with expressions of interest welcomed.

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Quality in a #mhealth app is built in the design phase

1/3/2016

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In our upcoming Hacking HealthTech Hackathon with University of Newcastle, we're targeting interdisciplinary teaming and collaboration to help stimulate the creation of the next generation of potential health entrepreneurs and ventures. It's an event focussed on building both digital literacy and product design literacy at undergraduate level, using experienced clinicians and mentors to help shape better designed ventures and ideas.

We're seeing some excellent resources appearing about the shortfalls of Mobile Health Apps (called mHealth for short) available on iTunes and Android Marketplaces. To help in briefing our event attendees, we've collected some of the latest research and articles on how quality is rated - it's something that needs to be designed in from the start - and put it into our Devpost discussion threads as http://2016-hacking-healthtech-uon.devpost.com/forum_topics/5641-building-quality-into-health-apps-from-the-start.

We're also going to drop them in here for general audience visibility and comment.

Developing a Framework for Evaluating the Patient Engagement, Quality, and Safety of Mobile Health Applications: http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/media/files/publications/issue-brief/2016/feb/1863_singh_framework_evaluating_mobile_health_apps_ib_v2.pdf

Mobile Applications Rating Scale - Young and Well CRC: http://www.youngandwellcrc.org.au/knowledge-hub/publications/mars/

ABC News: "Majority of mental health apps based on flimsy evidence, if any at all, research finds": http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-25/mental-health-apps-based-on-flimsy-evidence/7200510

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the Atlassian platform as a hackathon TOOLKIT

23/7/2015

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There's nothing quite like the intensity of a 48hr Hackathon to test a teams productivity and their execution speed for the Form, Storm, Norm and Perform team development cycle. It's an environment where the collaboration is fast paced and needs tools that are up to the challenge.

Laughing Mind recently partnered with a team of complete strangers as part of the Melbourne 'Hacking Ageing' Hackathon, hosted by Health XL at the Carlton Connect Initiative CoWorking space in July, 2015. We were tasked to come up with a response to one of three key Aged Care sector challenges: Dementia Care, Loneliness+Physical Inactivity, Malnutrition.

For many of the team, this was their first opportunity to be exposed to a range of tools from the Atlassian stack. I was there with my Health Professional and Atlassian Ecosystem partner hats on, knowing some of the sector challenges and what might be possible with targeted focus.

Our #HXLHack #collaboration experience, powered by @Atlassian @balsamiq Great experiential learning 4 team. pic.twitter.com/IX8haaPMyd
— laughingmind (@laughingmind) July 11, 2015

Here's what we used, all run from Atlassian Cloud services and the Atlassian Marketplace:

Confluence: For product scoping, documenting target audience market research and as an all-in-one-place repository for team products. We then bolstered it with the following add-on products to enhance our product needs analysis, business model and wireframe development:

Comala Canvas: for Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas blueprints
Gliffy: For use-case and persona exploration to confirm needs, function points
Balsamiq: For wireframe mockups for mobile devices (tablets, smartphones)

Product Experience Canvas - sample.

Balsamiq Mockup sample

HipChat: We needed an Instant Messaging platform that was going to be able to pull in the activity stream of updates from Confluence pages that were being worked on, as well as support fast file share, URL share and team comments. That gave us the capacity to see page updates rolling in as the team churned through our analysis and product planning. It also gave us the capacity (though we didn't use it on this occasion, with an in-house reference audience) to reach out to target audiences for a secure one-on-one chat with them entering the room as a guest, for extra validation.

JIRA: Whilst provisioned, task allocation wasn't needed whilst we clustered in one spot as a co-located team; if we had been faced with the challenge of co-ordinating tasking with a larger team, this would definitely have been used, but team size played in our favour on this occasion.

Hackathon Outcomes

The team was fortunately comprised of some excellent tech toolsmiths, UX skills and product development - we made use of our team from Via-Apps to leverage their MobileSmith Application Development platform to come up with a 1st generation App build, able to be downloaded onto both iOS and Android devices as an installable, functioning App within a 36hr period. Yes, that's quick. As a result of our efforts, we've now identified:

A fantastic Product Development guy in Mike Ebinum from Seed Digital;
A nimble + experienced App Development partner with cross-platform development capability;
Opportunities beyond the Hackathon;
Refinement opportunities in the platform provisioning model to feedback to Atlassian;
Addressable market opportunities of Dementia Caregivers in a Consumer Directed Care model, making services easier to find and engage;
Integration opportunities with IBM Watson and Bluemix for some targeted Cognitive Computing feature sets.

5min Q+A - views from the team

I took the time to do a quick retrospective with our team to explore their experience of the Atlassian tools, with a few short questions, bearing in mind this was a fast baptism of fire for a team of seasoned, experienced professionals that had not had much exposure to the platform before :

What was your awareness of Atlassian products before we met?

Aware if it, but almost no experience using it.

None. On the projects I worked we use platforms such as Slack.
We were more communication oriented. But I had never heard of Atlassian before,

Some familiarity with Jira (ticketing, change management) – no real experience of Confluence UX.

What did you find most useful about them in our Project?

Having a single place in which to deposit all information, The ease of sharing information, Confluence’s ability to manage multiple edits.

The platform in general is pretty cool.

I was surprised at the degree of effectiveness..Confluence.. introduced..how quickly it brought us together collaboratively ie. there was no need to go looking for things, there was a place and space for new content which was immediately shared (by doing nothing further) with everyone involved.

What would you say to someone interested in using the Atlassian platform, from your recent experience?

Make sure you get at least 10 minutes worth of overview / training before jumping in.

I like it. I use it for all my projects. BUT be patient in learning how to use it.
Yet, as I used it, I needed to learn how to use it. Not 100% intuitive.
Once you know the tricks that can be really complicated it's better.

I think it is a fantastic opportunity. What I’m looking for is enterprise reliability and a great user experience, the Atlassian platform seems to address both. There would appear to be a number of ‘hidden gems’ and talking to someone who knows the product back to front to help would be my recommendation. I’m quite comfortable trusting the platform...would be comfortable recommending to peers.

Thanks crew, would work with each of you again in a heartbeat. No question.

#HXLHACK Memorable #hackathon w @ViaAppsOz @PedroRosasMex + Mike from @seeddigitalco Gr8 team. @DeveloperSteve pix pic.twitter.com/p1iFOIc2hE
— laughingmind (@laughingmind) July 13, 2015

.@Health_xl #hxlhack overview and solutions here: http://t.co/GpcW7WQMqq @aging20 #a2coverage
— Stephen Johnston (@sdbj) July 23, 2015

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portable power for cpap devices

24/6/2015

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Sleep Apnoea is no respecter of lifestyle, but nor should it prevent you from doing the activities you love and getting out amongst the outdoors, camping and exploring. With portable power options to cover a wide range of devices, we've taken a closer look at the power demands of CPAP devices to see what works well with CPAP Device power demands within our Goal Zero product lineup at store.laughingmind.com.

on the move but need quiet cpap power at night? Yeti400

The Yeti400 for compact, portable power.

The Yeti 400 Powerpack is a mobile, portable powerhouse available in both single recharger form, or bundled into a Kit with matched Solar panels. This little box of packaged sunshine has proven its value in mobile business and camping operations where we've run camping fridges + lighting systems, charged laptops and devices, without chewing up valuable load space or keeping us awake with generator hum and buzz.

At 26cm x 30.3cm x 20.3 cm, it's small format makes it a convenient item to locate next to your CPAP device when camping, with its silent operation powering your restful sleep through the night. With an inbuilt integrated battery, inverter and smart display system, it's a proven simple convenient option to lugging multiple additional items to go with your CPAP device.

Once finished for the night, your Yeti400 is then ready for duty during the day, capable of powering up a range of other devices when you're on the move.

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health apps - guidance tools for robust design

Incubating hunter-based healthtech talent for global impact

a 20hr digital health rapid prototyping challenge

Our event winners

positioning the hunter as a healthtech development centre

Quality in a #mhealth app is built in the design phase

the Atlassian platform as a hackathon TOOLKIT

Hackathon Outcomes

5min Q+A - views from the team

portable power for cpap devices

on the move but need quiet cpap power at night? Yeti400

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