New Media Medicine
Despite amazing advances in medicines and medical technology over the past 50 years, health care is in crisis. Costs are skyrocketing, health outcomes are uneven, and the patient experience is unacceptable. The reason: the historical inequality between medical experts and health-care professionals (particularly doctors) and patients. This inequality was based on information asymmetry: only experts could access medical information and use it to conduct medical research, make diagnoses and develop treatments. The Internet has all but destroyed the information asymmetry, but the inequality remains. At New Media Medicine, we believe that people, working together in creative new ways, can succeed where the medical establishment has failed. As a society, we have dramatically underestimated the power of ordinary people to transform the system, to take care of their own health, to help develop therapies and to help solve massive public health problems. It’s time for a powershift in health care. We are pioneering new media technologies that will enable radical new collaborations between doctors, patients and communities, to catalyze a revolution in human health.
Research Projects
CollaboRhythm
CollaboRhythm is a platform that enables patients to be at the center of every interaction in their healthcare with the goal of empowering them to be involved, reflective, and proactive. Care can be coordinated securely through cell phones, tablets, televisions, and computers so that support can be provided in real-time in the real world instead of through inconvenient doctor's office visits. We are currently developing and demonstrating applications for diabetes and hypertension management. A number of third parties have also developed exciting applications using CollaboRhythm. Please visit http://newmed.media.mit.edu to learn about how you can build a project with us using CollaboRhythm.Frank Moss, John Moore MD, Scott Gilroy, Joslin Diabetes Clinic, UMass Medical School, Department of Veterans Affairs, Children's Hospital Boston, Boston Medical CenterCollective Discovery
The choices we make about diet, environment, medications, or alternative therapies constitute a massive collection of "everyday experiments." These data remain largely unrecorded and are underutilized by traditional research institutions. Collective Discovery leverages the intuition and insight of patient communities to generate datasets about everyday experiments. We support the patient's process by simplifying tracking and assessment of lifestyle changes in their bodies and lives. This model is embodied in the free-for-the-public website Personal Experiments (http://personalexperiments.org) and is used to power a clinical "N-of-1" experiment platform called MyIBD at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital.Frank Moss and Ian EslickForgetAboutIT?
ForgetAboutIT has become an integrated part of CollaboRhythm. Currently only 50% of patients with chronic diseases take their medications. The problem is not simple forgetfulness; it is a complex combination of lack of understanding, poor self-reflection, limited social support, and almost non-existent communication between provider and patient. ForgetAboutIT? is a system to support medication adherence which presupposes that patients engaged in tight, collaborative communication with their providers through interactive interfaces would think it preposterous not to take their medications. Technically, it is an awareness system that employs ubiquitous connectivity on the patient side through cell phones, televisions, and other interactive devices and a multi-modal collaborative workstation on the provider side.John Moore MD and Frank MossI'm Listening
Increasing understanding of how to categorize patient symptoms for efficient diagnosis has led to structured patient interviews and diagnostic flowcharts that can provide diagnostic accuracy and save valuable physician time. But the rigidity of predefined questions and controlled vocabulary for answers can leave patients feeling over-constrained, as if the doctor (or computer system) is not really attending to them. I’m Listening is a system for automatically conducting patient pre-visit interviews. It does not replace a human doctor, but can be used before an office visit to prepare the patient, deliver educational materials or triage care, and preorder appropriate tests, making better use of both doctor and patient time. It uses an on-screen avatar and natural language processing to (partially) understand the patient's response. Key is a common-sense reasoning system that lets patients express themselves in unconstrained natural language, even using metaphor, and that maps the language to medically relevant categories.John Moore MD, Henry Lieberman and Frank MossOovit PT
Mar Gonzalez, John Moore, and Frank MossPatient adherence to physical therapy regimens is poor, and there is a lack of quantitative data about patient performance, particularly at home. This project is an end-to-end virtual rehabilitation system for supporting patient adherence to home exercise that addresses the multi-factorial nature of the problem. The physical therapist and patient make shared decisions about appropriate exercises and goals and patients use a sensor-enabled gaming interface at home to perform exercises. Quantitative data is then fed back to the therapist, who can properly adjust the regimen and give reinforcing feedback and support.
