GigaOM » food-and-drug-administration

Consumer privacy in the mobile advertising era

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 17:18:28 +0000

Smartphones can enable an amazing level of connectivity, but they can also allow that activity to be monitored and used in controversial ways. But for mobile marketing to realize its full potential, consumers may need to sacrifice their privacy to one degree or another. This report is intended for every link in the mobile-marketing chain, from app and web developers to advertisers to providers of mobile operating systems. It examines the innate trade-offs between consumer privacy and successful business models that leverage potentially sensitive user information, and it details existing and pending regulations that will shape the growth of mobile advertising and marketing. Finally, the report offers suggestions and best practices that will help every player in the value chain tap the market.

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Bits meet bite: Check out the connected toothbrush

Stacey Higginbotham — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:17:56 +0000

Want to really embrace the quantitative self? Forget tracking your sleep and start tracking your dental hygiene. Beam Technologies, a year-old startup, is set to introduce a Bluetooth-enabled toothbrush and app that will launch next month. The toothbrush contains a sensor and Bluetooth radio that will send your brushing information to a smartphone app. Later versions will also track how long you spent in certain areas of the mouth and might add some kind of gamification layer to help encourage better brushing.

Alex X. Frommeyer, the CEO and founder of Beam, says the Beam Brush should hit shelves in early March and retail for about $50 for the base and $3 for a replaceable brush head. The Android app is ready, and the iOS app should be ready when the toothbrush launches or soon after. His startup, which is based in Louisville, Ky., is set to close on an initial round of funding in a few weeks. He didn’t disclose the amount but said it is less than $1 million.

Wait, what? Why put Bluetooth in my toothbrush?

The idea for creating a connected toothbrush came from a deeply personal and deeply practical place for Frommeyer. He had long been interested in the ways broadband and connectivity could upend the medical market, and had a personal connection to dentistry thanks to several family members working in the field. On a practical side, dentistry is an easier entry point into the medical field because the Food and Drug Administration has more lenient rules for approving toothbrushes. They are medical devices, but as long as someone submits the design to the FDA, he can sell it. That means Beam can sell its toothbrush without spending millions and waiting for FDA approval.

The first generation toothbrush may not appeal to those seeking the ultimate in data on their dental hygiene, as it will consist mostly of letting you track how long and when you brushed your teeth. To jazz up the experience, Frommeyer will let the app play songs and may incorporate a social element or game element into the process. At first this seems bizarre (although maybe not to those people who share their pictures of their dinners), but as a parent I would love one of these things so I can monitor how often my daughter brushes her teeth without standing right there in the bathroom.

Future iterations will also be able to show the user how long they spent in certain areas of the mouth. The sensor works via contact with the mouth, so it registers when the brush is scrubbing your teeth. I’d love for the app to become almost a reward system and prompt for good brushing, so when my daughter (or I) is brushing, the app could play a video or something fun, but if the brushing slacked off or spent too long in one place, the video stopped playing. I’m sure there are those of you who are scoffing at the idea that one can’t just suck it up for the two minutes it takes to brush your teeth, but I’m on board. After all, I already read a book or magazine while brushing, so I’m happy to be entertained while performing a mundane task.

Giving dentists your data opens up a can of worms

The promise of a connected toothbrush isn’t just a better brushing experience in Frommeyer’s eyes. He’d like patients to share that data with their dentists and hygienists. On an individual level that means better patient care (and you can still lie about flossing if you want), and on a macro level it could mean sharing aggregated data from millions of Beam Brush users, and finding patterns or shifts in how tooth decay occurs.

Of course medical data is a touchy subject and one that’s governed by laws such as HIPAA, but if this is a way to bring user-generated data from devices such as the beam Brush or a FitBit (see disclosure) into doctors’ offices, I’m interested. My own doctor showed absolutely no interest in the data collected from my FitBit, even though she does ask me to tell her what I’ve eaten in the last 24 hours every time I see her. Still, connected pedometers, sleep monitors and even apps that track blood pressure and other function are getting picked up by consumers, so maybe by the time I go to my next checkup my doctor will have changed her mind.

At that point, these types of devices might actually live up to the promise of helping change the medical industry, by offering better data, holding users accountable (perhaps through social sharing or merely with a doctor checking in on your progress) and letting people take charge of their health and habits. So as silly as a connected toothbrush might seem at first glance, it might be the lever that helps move the medical world.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Happtique aims to build a standard for mobile health apps

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:00:21 +0000

Many of us are using our smartphones to track our sleep or help manage our weight. A few use them to monitor our blood pressure or track insulin levels, but it’s hard for consumers or their doctors to say what’s a worthwhile app or not. But there’s no gold standard for patients or doctors. Even the Food and Drug Administration is trying to figure out the health app marketplace (GigaOM Pro sub req’d).

Happtique wants to change all that. The company spun out of the Greater New York Hospital Association Ventures to build an app store for hospitals and doctors. Its initial pilot involved 11 hospitals including Mount Sinai Hospital, the NYU School of Medicine, Beth Israel Medical Center — all in New York. But outside of creating app stores for individual hospitals to offer to patients, Happtique is now focusing on a bigger goal — creating a trusted standard for all medical apps.

Corey Ackerman, president of Happtique, explained that the hope is Happtique’s team of four experts can create a set of criteria by which to judge health applications and build a standards program around those criteria in the next six months. That standard will in turn help consumers and doctors know what apps to trust and help them filter the myriad options out there. Once those standards are set, Ackerman envisions developers paying to get their apps certified from Happtique, but would welcome a different model, provided it helped compensate the many doctors he believes will have to spend the time to review apps.

“Patients can go and can see a value in a set of standards for apps judged by actual doctors who treat that issue,” Ackerman said. “For example, oncologists won’t review diabetes apps.”

Developers who submit their apps would get feedback on how to make their app pass muster if it didn’t in the first place. It’s a model that would be similar to how device makers pay the Wi-Fi Alliance to get their gadgets certified. Happtique has convinced the following people to join its panel of experts to create the standards criteria:

Howard J. Luks, an associate professor of Orthopedic Surgery at New York Medical College and the Chief Of Sports Medicine And Arthroscopy at University Orthopedics, PC and Westchester Medical Center.
Franklin A. Shaffer, the Chief Executive Officer of CGFNS International, the certification organization for graduates of foreign nursing schools and largest global credentialing organization for nursing and allied healthcare personnel authorized by the Federal government.
Shuvo Roy, the director of the Biomedical Microdevices Laboratory and Associate Professor, Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, School of Pharmacy at the University of California, San Francisco.
Dave deBronkart, a cancer patient and blogger who has become a noted activist for healthcare transformation through participatory medicine and personal health data rights.

But as necessary as some kind of standard for medical apps might be, it’s unclear if Happtique has the clout and knowledge to build one from scratch. While many of the hospitals it works with are “name brands” in the health space, it’s a big leap to get from a name brand for doctors to helping an app stand out in a crowded app store and a crowded field. Happtique has found that there are 23,000 medical apps for iOS and Android devices alone.

Happtique will have to attract consumers and doctors to the standard while also convincing developers to pay for that seal of approval. Presumably it will seed some apps to the app store to give consumers a taste of what the seal means and help them trust it. That consumer demand might convince developers the certification is worth paying for. While Happtique is trying to do a useful thing, marketing isn’t just about offering utility, a fact that has doomed equally noble efforts. But as a confused customer who would rather get a doctor’s recommendation than some random tech blogger’s when it comes to medical apps, I hope this, or a similar effort wins out.

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Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:01:08 +0000

Connectivity changes everything. That’s the credo driving just about every corner of our day-to-day lives. As human beings, we are now connected to one another through not just our social networks but also our cars, the books we read, the albums we download and even our own health and wellness habits (to name just a few areas). With that in mind, GigaOM Pro has singled out certain areas in the technology industry where we see this shift to constant connectivity taking place most drastically.

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