health

A new study out of Denmark suggests that cell phone use may not increase your risk of some types of noncancerous brain tumors.

Reuters reported this week on a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology that found people who used a cell phone for 11 to 15 years were no more likely to develop an acoustic neuroma, a noncancerous brain tumor, than people who have been using cell phones for either a shorter period of time or who have never used a cell phone.

Even though acoustic neuroma, or vestibular schwannoma, as it is also known, is noncancerous, … Read more

Bluetooth audio accessory company Jawbone is extending its line into health and fitness. Later this year the company will launch a motion-recording wristband called Up that will connect to smartphone apps. It will be able to discern when its user is exercising, sleeping, or eating, Jawbone founder Hosain Rahman told me.

Rahman announced the product at the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Tuesday. It was, he says, more of a concept launch than a product release. He did not disclose when the product will be available or how much it will cost. Rather, he was hoping to generate interest … Read more

You may not have thought of using your iPhone to catalog your moles and freckles, but Health Discovery Corporation has. The company is the developer behind MelApp, a $1.99 iOS app that gives you a risk assessment for melanoma on your skin.

According to the American Melanoma Foundation, one American dies of melanoma every hour. It's worthwhile to dedicate a little time to watching your moles.

Here's the process. Take a picture of a suspicious mole with your camera. Label it, mark the diameter, and indicate how fast the mole's evolution has been. Click on the "Check Risk" button.

The image is uploaded to a server and run through an image analysis risk assessment process. According to the app's developer, MelApp has been validated using an image database licensed from John Hopkins University Medical Center.

MelApp comes back with a high- or low-risk diagnosis based on five parameters ranging from mole asymmetry to rate of evolution. A self-assessment feature can help verify the app's findings.… Read more

The explosion of social media has given researchers a lot of data to mine and trends to identify, but two computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University say they've developed sophisticated filtering software that is attracting particular attention from public health officials.

Twitter, which launched five years ago, has already been used by computer scientists to try to track the flu.

But when Johns Hopkins University computer scientists Mark Dredze and Michael Paul devised a method to filter and categorize health-related tweets, they weren't sure what they might find. So they decided to sort the tweets (they filtered 1.… Read more

A new report has punched some holes into arguments that mobile phones may cause cancer.

"Although there remains some uncertainty, the trend in the accumulating evidence is increasingly against the hypothesis that mobile phone use can cause brain tumors in adults," researchers from the International Commission for Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection Standing Committee on Epidemiology concluded in their findings published late last week in the Environmental Health Perspectives journal.

In the journal, the researchers released findings on brain cancer instances for males and females across different age categories both before and after handsets were released. They found that the … Read more

Even if you have insurance to cover the cost of your health care, understanding and managing it can still be a nightmare. You go the the doctor or get a procedure or lab test and typically have no idea what it will cost. A bill arrives, but you still don't often know how much you owe and how much the insurance company will pay. Eventually the insurance company mails you an "explanation of benefits," but even that can sometimes be indecipherable.

Enter Simplee, a free online personal health care expense management system. Like a Mint.com for … Read more

Three years after launching Google Health, the company has decided to pull the plug on the ailing personal health records service. The lights are also going out for the Google PowerMeter service, which monitors Web-based home energy use.

The Google Health service will expire on January 1, 2012, but users will have until January 1, 2013, to transfer their data out of the system before it gets deleted entirely.

"Now, with a few years of experience, we've observed that Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would," Google said in a blog post today. &… Read more

SEATTLE--Microsoft thinks its Kinect motion-sensing game controller will find a spot in operating rooms and doctors offices as it already has in consumers' living rooms.

The software giant, which has been working for years to get health care companies to use its technology, is trying to open doors with Kinect. Today at the Pacific Health Summit here, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, Craig Mundie, showed how medical providers can use the technology to improve care.

In one scenario, patients virtually attend group therapy sessions. But rather than displaying their actual images, Kinect allows them to use avatars, which can capture the movements of the arms, shoulders, even eyebrows, while allowing them to maintain anonymity with the group.

"There's a naturalness to it, even though there's a cartoonish quality about it," Mundie said. "But you get a huge amount of clues."

In his scenario, one patient, listening to another member of the group chat, sat with arms crossed, brow furrowed, and appeared disinterested. That could be a clinical sign of depression worth following.

This isn't just about Kinect, though. Microsoft and other big tech companies such as Google have been courting the health care market for years, prompted in no small part by federal initiatives to drive the digitization of medicine. But those initiatives have so far had, at best, mixed success, in an industry that loves the latest technical marvel in equipment but resists the digitization of patient records. But with so much spent on health care, the lure for tech providers is hard to ignore.… Read more

A laptop containing unnamed patient information has gone missing from a subsidiary of the National Health Service North Central London health authority,

The Sun reported on Wednesday that the laptop, which was lost along with 19 others three weeks ago, contained the unencrypted health details of over 8.63 million people and records of 18 million hospital visits, operations and procedures. It was taken from a storeroom of London Health Programmes, a medical research organization based within the NHS North Central London health authority.

Both the UK's privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), and the police are … Read more