NewMediaMedicine from MIT

This week I begin my examination of how universities are intersecting with new media and medicine to confront the overwhelming problem of healthcare in the United States.

This from NEWMEDIAMEDICINE – the MIT Media lab. It has a tag which reads: Radical new collaborations catalyzing a revolution in health

So who’s collaborating? On what? And how will this catalyze a revolution in health? And finally – what are they suggesting by “revolution?”

According to the website (http://newmed.media.mit.edu/intro) New Media Medicine is dedicated to shifting the focus on healthcare away from the traditional role of the doctor and giving more agency to the individual who is experiencing the health issue. The organization goes so far as to recommend putting the individual “on an equal footing with doctors, researchers, and other experts.” MIT is working on new technologies that will enable collaborations with individuals and their healthcare professionals and in doing so will allow the individual, it appears, a greater commitment to their wellness.

On the surface one could reasonably ask: isn’t the fact that one is ill reason enough to participate in the cure? But MIT feels that by allowing more involvement in the decision making process regarding therapy the individual participates more enthusiastically and, by virtue of this fact, has a greater chance of recovery. I have to say that this makes sense to me!

At present the team consists of 6 investigators whose expertise range from a medical doctor, to a software engineer, to a communications expert – and all the spaces in between. Each of the collaborators brings a special “heart” to the project and each seems to have a particular area of concentration with regard to the projects.

A short list of the projects includes “Collaborythm” – which is a speech and touch controlled system in which the doctor and patients make collaborative decisions about the patient’s care protocol: http://vimeo.com/4400829; “Collective Discovery” which seeks to interact with patient communities allowing communities to provide collective data and to use data effectively in community-wide practices involving healthcare decisions; and “Weight Mate” – subtitled: “getting to know your food moods” which uses smart phones to track dietary information and return context-sensitive information to the end user regarding trends toward health or illness. And there are more!

Always an innovator in technology, MIT is proving once again to thing strategically, and outside the box, about one of the nation (and the world’s) most pressing concerns.