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
Awaken
Frank Moss, Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Sai T. Moturu and Kimberly ShellenbergerSleep problems such as insomnia have a significant impact on public health, affect the quality of life and productivity of millions daily, present a yearly economic burden in the billions, and are strongly associated with multiple comorbid conditions. Several factors affecting sleep are primarily behavioral and not always obvious. This project aims to detect the behaviors that affect sleep and use this knowledge to help users improve sleep habits. While asleep, a wearable sensor headband is used to track the quality of sleep. While awake, smart phones are used to capture behaviors that can impact sleep. Based on the data collected, the phones also provide context-sensitive suggestions and coaching elements borrowed from cognitive behavioral therapy to improve awake behaviors and sleep habits, while their communication capabilities are used to enhance social support from sleeping partners and family members.
CollaboRhythm
Boston Medical Center, Children's Hospital Boston, Department of Veterans Affairs, Joslin Diabetes Clinic, Frank Moss, Scott Gilroy, John Oliver Moore, Mayo Clinic and UMass Medical SchoolCollaboRhythm is a platform that enables patients to be at the center of every interaction in their healthcare with the goal of encouraging them to be involved, reflective, and proactive so that they may become more self-efficacious. It includes relational agents that question and educate patients prior to visits and that help them manage chronic diseases. A collaborative workstation for the office allows for shared decision-making where the patient is actually encouraged to control the system. Data is stored in a patient-controlled health record, so that the patient has access to his or her information in any place at any time. Numerous medical devices for the home and office including glucometers, sphygmomanometers, pulse oximeters, and weight scales feed their data into the system. Finally, the whole system is designed for tele-collaboration. Care can be coordinated through cell phones, televisions, computers, as well as more novel devices like internet media displays.
Collective Discovery
Frank Moss and Ian EslickThe 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 aims to leverage the intuition and insight of patient communities to mine information about everyday experiences. Moving the community discourse from anecdotes to data will lead to better decision-making, stronger self-advocacy, identification of novel therapies, and inspiration of better hypotheses in traditional research, accelerating the search for new drugs and treatments. The unique characteristic of our Collective Discovery model is the use of knowledge representation and natural language processing to mediate communal hypothesis generation and to compensate for methodological errors and self-reporting bias. This model is being deployed in a real-world context as part of a partnership with the LAM Treatment Alliance and the greater LAM community.
ForgetAboutIT?
John Moore MD and Frank MossCurrently 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. For this sponsor event, we are demonstrating a new application for hypertension management that we have piloted with the Mayo Clinic.
I'm Listening
John Moore MD, Henry Lieberman and Frank MossIncreasing 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.
IDA: Inexpensive Networked Digital Stethoscope
Yadid AyzenbergComplex and expensive medical devices are mainly used in medical facilities by health professionals. IDA is an attempt to disrupt this paradigm and introduce a new type of device: easy to use, low cost, and open source. It is a digital stethoscope that can be connected to the Internet for streaming the physiological data to remote clinicians. Designed to be fabricated anywhere in the world with minimal equipment, it can be operated by individuals without medical training.
LAMsight: A Data-Driven Disease Community
Frank Moss, Ian Eslick, Amy Farber and LAM Treatment AllianceLAMsight is a practical experiment in creating new models for collaboration between researchers, clinicians, and patients. We are working with a rare-disease advocacy organization to identify and implement collaboration modes that help accelerate research on the rare disease LAM (Lymphangioleiomyomatosis), a multi-system, fatal disease that typically strikes women in their child-bearing years.
Oovit PT
Sai T. Moturu, 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 aims to build an end-to-end virtual rehabilitation system for supporting patient adherence to home exercise that addresses the multi-factorial nature of the problem. Using the proposed system, the physical therapist and patient would make shared decisions about appropriate exercises and goals and patients would 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.
