Ned Anderson: The Fourth Wave: Digital Health Newsletter — Nov 9, 2018

The Fourth Wave: Digital Health Newsletter — Nov 6, 2018 — No. 111

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If you’re on LinkedIn, please do join the Digital Health group, which I founded in 2009. The group serves to advance knowledge and build relationships between people interested in the convergence of the digital and genomic revolutions with health, healthcare, living, and society.

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GLOBAL EVENT LIST
This is a crowdsourced list of global conferences and events focused on or relevant to digital health.

FEATURED EVENTS
CNS Summit – Nov 1-4, 2018 in Boca Raton, Florida, USA.

Digital Health World Congress 2018 Winter Edition, Nov 28-29 in London, UK

Digital Medicine and Medtech Showcase, Jan 8-9, 2019 in San Francisco, CA

EVENT PROMOTION
Please contact me for options on event promotion, including having your event featured at the top of this list, featured in my weekly Digital Health group announcements, newsletter, and on Twitter.

SUBMITTING AN EVENT
Please provide the event name, date(s), event website link (direct and not a shortened url), one-paragraph event description, the venue name, and location (city and country). Not all events are relevant to digital health and webinars are typically not allowed, but you can ask me about promotion options.

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The Fourth Wave: Digital Health Newsletter for Nov 9

Privacy International (PI), a UK-based charity that defends and promotes the right to privacy across the world and challenges overreaching state and corporate surveillance, has filed GDPR complaintsagainst seven companies: Experian, Equifax, Oracle, Acxiom, Criteo, Quantcast, and Tapad, for “wide-scale and systematic infringements of data protection law.” The complaints allege that the practices of these companies have breached GDPR principles of transparency, fairness, lawfulness, purpose limitation, data minimization, and accuracy, plus that they have no legal basis to use data in the way they do.

According to Privacy International’s legal officer, Ailidh Callander: “The data broker and ad-tech industries are premised on exploiting people’s data. Most people have likely never heard of these companies, and yet they are amassing as much data about us as they can and building intricate profiles about our lives. The GDPR sets clear limits on the abuse of personal data. PI’s complaints set out why we consider these companies’ practices are failing to meet the standard—yet we’ve only been able to scratch the surface with regard to their data exploitation practices. GDPR gives regulators teeth and now is the time to use them to hold these companies to account.”

Hims, a men’s telehealth direct-to-consumer (DTC) company—not to be confused with HIMSS, the non-profit digital health organization—has launched a new vertical for women called, naturally, “ Hers”. The site will sell prescription skin creams, birth control pills, and Addyi, a controversial libido-boosting medicine.

LIVING & SOCIETY

According to a new report, kids’ apps are crammed with ads. In a new study of the most downloaded apps for children ages 5 and younger, researchers found advertising in almost all of them.

The new Roomba robot vacuum by iRobot collects data on your home and also takes pictures of the inside. Moreover, it shares the collected data with Google.

Despite Facebook’s assurances of privacy precautions being integrated within its new Portal+ in-home telecommunications camera and video screen, WSJ reporter Joanna Stern refused to actually use the system in her home and titled her review of it: Facebook Portal Non-Review: Why I Didn’t Put Facebook’s Camera in My Home.

FDA CLEARANCE

The FDA has cleared the first-ever direct to consumer (DTC) genetic test for how well medications may work. However, the agency states that the new test by 23andMe can’t assess whether a drug is appropriate or be considered by users to be medical advice.

RESEARCH & DRUG DEVELOPMENt

In a Scientific American op-ed, Vijay Pande, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz leading the firm’s investments in digital health companies, writes about how we can already engineer biology and should be doing more of it in drug development: “In biology, we’ve already surpassed Moore’s Law; the cost of genomics has come down over a million-fold in two decades. Why can’t we carry this process to other areas in bio as well? The question now isn’t whether this is possible in biology or not, as the Grove fallacy argued, but how to do it, given where we are in engineering biology today.”

A wearable ultrasound patch developed by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) is able to record central blood pressure in the carotid artery, internal jugular vein, and external jugular vein. The patch emits continuous ultrasound waves that monitor changes in the shape and size of pulsing blood vessels, an indication of rising and dropping blood pressure.

M&A

Doc.ai, a company that plans to pay cryptocurrency to people when they share their medical data with scientists, hasacquired Crestle.ai, which has a platform that enables the quick deployment of AI systems.

DNA sequencing giant Illumina is acquiringPacific Biosciences for $1.2 billion, or about half its IPO price. While Oxford Nanopore is the main competition to PacBio in the long-read market, according to Illumina CEO Francis Illumina: “The place where PacBio really differentiates itself is accuracy. Its accuracy profile is really better than anything else in the market.”

In response to this market consolidation, Yaniv Erlich, CSO at genealogy platform MyHeritage tweeted a thread with his comments on how the “ILMN purchase of PacBio is bad news for the genomics community.”

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Paul Sonnier
Advisor ⋅ Author ⋅ Speaker ⋅ Technologist ⋅ Social Entrepreneur
Book: The Fourth Wave: Digital Health
Founder, Digital Health group on LinkedIn
Creator, Story of Digital Health
Twitter: @Paul_Sonnier
San Diego, CA, USA

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