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The Fourth Wave: Digital Health Update ⋅ Paul Sonnier ⋅ Apr 10, 2018 ⋅ #321
Dear Group,
I posted an article on LinkedIn sharing the introduction to my book, “The Fourth Wave: Digital Health”
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The Fourth Wave: Digital Health Newsletter for Apr 9
Elon Musk tweeted a link to a new documentary movie ” Do You Trust This Computer?” stating: “Nothing will affect the future of humanity more than digital super-intelligence. Watch Chris Paine’s new AI movie for free until Sunday night.” I was able to watch it within the free-viewing window and was impressed by the production values, script, and range of featured experts (inlcuding, of course, Musk). One quote by Dr. Brian Herman, an endovascular neurosurgeon and chair of interventional neuroradiology at Eisenhower Medical Center echoed a statement I made during a recent conversation with a physician friend: “It seems that we are feeding it and creating it. But in a way we are a slave to the technology: Because we can’t go back.” Coinicidentally, while attending an event at the Salk Institute here in San Diego today, someone said pretty much the same thing to me regarding traditional versus digital-enabled modern drug development: “we can’t go back.”
A review of the film by Motherboard’s Daniel Oberhaus is critical of whether it actually accomplished anything. According to Oberhaus: “The breadth of the film sacrifices any chance of engaging with the question of artificial intelligence and its implications at anything deeper than the absolute surface level.” He adds that: “Before the credits roll, the screen goes black and displays this message: “The pursuit of artificial intelligence is a multibillion dollar industry with almost no regulations.” One has to wonder why Paine didn’t ask the leaders of this industry that he assembled for the film how effective AI regulation would be accomplished and what their own businesses are doing to prevent the shitty future they all describe.”
I had a similar reaction and tweeted the following: “Very good points made in this piece by @DMOberhaus… And echoes what I was thinking, too, re lots of expert commentary, but where was the self-reflection and accountability by the people & companies creating the #AI #DigitalHealth”
VIDEO
Vijay Pande from tech VC firm Andreessen Horowitz posted a video on YouTube comparing Moore’s law to Eroom’s law, which is the observation that drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology.
Immediately after finishing my keynote presentation at the XPOMET Convention in Leipzig, Germany on March 21, I was interviewed alongside Nick Adkins, of #pinksocks fame. The video is viewable here.
LIVING AND SOCIETY
Expressing a valid concern, Tanith Carey writes in The Telegraph that AI assistants like Alexa can result in moms no longer being the ultimate authority for their kids.
Apple CEO Tim Cook recently stated that data privacy is a civil liberty akin to freedom of speech. The MSNBC and Recode video interview segment can be viewed here.
There was a great profile of Dan Shefet in NPR by Aarti Shahani, who writes in “The Paris Lawyer Who Gives Google Nightmares” that Shefet “battled long and hard against Google in court in Paris. And surprisingly, in a defining moment in the battle over digital rights, Shefet came out the victor.”
The U.S. Department Of Homeland Security is planning to compile a database of journalists and influencers. (Hmm, should I be concerned?) The proposed “media monitoring” would track nearly 300,000 global journalists and media influencers, which may include bloggers and podcasters.
I came across an incredible Facebook video in a CNET episode of “What the Future” showing massive drones that are tethered to vehicles and can de-ice wind turbines or put out fires. In an untethered application shown, the drones are also powerful enough to pull drowning people out of the water.
The website Backpage has been sezied and disabled by the U.S. Department of Justice. The site is known for adult ads, but has been accused of enabling sex trafficking. Sex workers and critics say this move may endanger sex workers and inhibit free speech. Michael Lacey, the founder of Backpage, was also arrested. Violet Blue, a critic of the “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act” and “Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act”, writes in Engagdet that Congress has used these proposed laws to essentially legalize sex censorship and that they incorrectly conflate sex trafficking and sex work, adding: “One week ago, the worst possible legislation curtailing free speech online passed and sex censorship bill FOSTA-SESTA is on its way to be signed into law by Trump.”
LIVING AND SOCIETY (FACEBOOK)
Facebook reportedly sent a doctor to visit hospitals and ask them to share patient data with them with the purpose of associating people’s medical conditions with their Facebook profiles.
Facebook is tracking people who aren’t even on Facebook. As the ACLU’s Daniel Kahn Gillmor writes: “Facebook and other massive web companies represent a strong push toward unaccountable centralized social control, which I think makes our society more unequal and more unjust.”
Facebook plans to enable a message unsend feature for all users of Messenger. The announcement follows backlash after it was revealed that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg already had the ability to do this.
While Facebook has banned tobacco ads, the tobacco industry has found other ways to reach teens on the platform. As Stephanie Lee reports in Buzzfeed News, a new study by Stanford University found that tobacco and e-cigarette-related pages are liked by tens of thousands of people.
Facebook has devalued the birthday, this according to Glenn Fleishman at Fast Company, who writes: “What was once a private celebration has become public currency. What have we lost? As you’ve probably noticed if you’re on Facebook, the service has become ever-more aggressive about encouraging you to celebrate the birthdays of those in your social graph. It reminds you of your friends’ birthdays… It’s even experimented with pre-filling out birthday wishes, allowing you to thoughtfully mark a friend’s special day with a single click.”
HEALTHCARE
According to the results of a randomized trial published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, a smartphone app that uses the phone’s camera “performed better than traditional physical examination to assess blood flow in a wrist artery for patients undergoing coronary angiography.”
FOOD SECURITY AND SAFETY
France-based grocery chain Carrefour has put free-range chickens on the blockchain. Consumers can now scan the packaging label with their smartphone camera and see the bird’s entire life story. The company also announced that it will roll the service out to other animal and vegetable product lines including eggs, cheese, milk, oranges, tomatoes, salmon, and ground beef steak. The company states that this is “An innovative system designed (to) guarantee consumers complete product traceability” and that “A blockchain is a secure digital database that cannot be falsified in which all information sent by its users is stored. It can be used in the food sector so that each and every party along the length of the supply chain (producers, processors and distributors) can provide traceability information about their particular role and for each batch (dates, places, farm buildings, distribution channels, potential treatments, etc.).”
According to Frank Yiannas, Walmart’s VP of food safety and health: “There’s no question about it, blockchain will do for food traceability what the internet did for communication,” and he estimates that for every 1% reduction in food-borne diseases in the U.S., the economy would benefit by about $700 million from increased productivity due to reduced illness and fewer days lost at work.
INNOVATION
Cult of Mac ran a piece last week commemorating the first mobile phone call made 45 years ago on April 3, 1973 by Martin ‘Marty’ Cooper. The above image is one I use in my keynote presentation to highlight my work history at Morotorla as well as Marty’s contribution to the digital and digital health revolutions.
Researchers at MIT have developed a system comprised of a headset containing neuromuscular sensors along with companion software that can read the words you’re picturing in your mind. This enables interactions with people and digital devices, including virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa.
WEARABLE TECH
Apple is being sued over patents that reportedly cover the Watch’s heart rate sensor. The plaintiff claims to have shown Apple the patents prior to the launch of the Watch. However, as Mariella Moon reports in Engadget, Apple “had a heard rate sensor (in the Watch) from the start, and it probably started developing the tech years before the wearable’s launch. June 2014 (when the meetings took place) was only three months before the Watch’s debut.” Also, the plaintiff broadened the pending patents following his meeting with Apple.
Leap Motion has designed a $100 augmented reality (AR) headset that has “super-powerful” hand tracking to enable its platform called Project North Star. Users wearing the headset would be able to precisely manipulate objects with their hands. For now, it’s not available to consumers. The necessary hardware specifications and software will be released via an open source license for developers. According to a statement by the company: “We hope that these designs will inspire a new generation of experimental AR systems that will shift the conversation from what an AR system should look like, to what an AR experience should feel like.”
GENOMICS
Sharon Begley reports in STAT News that scientists are ‘thinking the unthinkable’, which is that the gene editing tool CRISPR could reverse brain diseases. While not a treatment in the sense of reducing the severity of brain diseases, progression, or alleviating symptoms, it would entail penetrating “the brain of a patient who has lived with a disorder for years and repair the mutation that caused it, unleashing the brain’s capacity of neuroplasticity to weave new circuitry, grow new neurons, or otherwise do right what it did wrong when the mutant gene called the shots.”
Writing in Medium, David Ewing Duncan asks: Is the World Ready for Synthetic People?. As David explains: “Stanford bioengineer Drew Endy doesn’t mind bringing dragons to life. What really scares him are humans. Endy heads a research team at Stanford that is, as he puts it, building genetically encoded computers and redesigning genomes. What that means: he’s trying engineer life forms to do useful things.”
23andMe CEO Ann Wojcicki wrote an op-ed in STAT News titled: Consumers don’t need experts to interpret 23andMe genetic risk reports. According to Wojcicki: “Forty years ago, when the first at-home pregnancy tests became available, some physicians warned against their use. They thought women might not be able to handle such information on their own and claimed that the results might trigger them to make irrational decisions — some went so far as to claim it would lead to suicides. Looking back, it seems unthinkable that we questioned women’s ability to access this kind of information.” Wojcicki points to 23andMe’s recent FDA authorization for the first ever direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic test for an inherited risk for cancer (for the variants in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that are associated with an increased chance of developing breast and ovarian cancer) and adds that: “Historically, access to this type of testing has been gated by insurance companies and couldn’t be obtained without an order from a physician or genetic counselor. Making this kind of test directly available to consumers is a huge milestone in empowering people to be in control of their own health information.”
FUNDING AND INVESTMENT
Synthetic DNA company Twist Bioscience has completed a $50 million round of financing that it will use to continue advancement of digital data storage into DNA as well as “forward integration toward drug discovery.”
According to CEO Emily Leproust: “We have used our proprietary DNA synthesis platform, which delivers precision at a scale previously not available, to develop a portfolio of diverse products for two large market opportunities – the synthetic biology market through our gene and oligo pool offerings, and the next-generation sequencing market through our exome and custom target enrichment solutions.”
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Copyright © 2018 Paul Sonnier, Story of Digital Health
Paul Sonnier
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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