-----
This weekly blog is to explore the larger issues around Digital Health, data security, data privacy, AI / ML. technology and related matters.
I will also try to highlight ADHA Propaganda when I come upon it.
Just so we keep count, the latest Notes from the ADHA Board are dated 6 December, 2018! Secrecy unconstrained! This is really the behaviour of a federal public agency gone rogue – and it just goes on! When you read this it will be well over 13 months of radio silence, and better still the CEO, COO and the Chief of Staff have also gone. I wonder will things improve now?
Note: Appearance here is not to suggest I see any credibility or value in what follows. I will leave it to the reader to decide what is worthwhile and what is not! The point is to let people know what is being said / published that I have come upon.
-----
Faster data to transform health, streaming and IoT
From smarter homes to cars that talk to each other and earbuds that double as hearing aids, the next decade will usher in some groundbreaking technological changes - all underpinned by speed.
Brian X. Chen
Jan 3, 2020 — 12.01am
The 2010s made one thing clear: technology is everywhere in life.
It is in our homes with thermostats that heat up our residences before we walk through the door. It's in our cars with safety features that warn us about vehicles in adjacent lanes. It's on our television sets, where many of us are streaming shows and movies through apps. We even wear it on ourselves in the form of wristwatches that monitor our health.
In 2020 and the coming decade, these trends are likely to gather momentum. They will also be on display next week at CES, an enormous consumer electronics trade show in Las Vegas that typically serves as a window into the year's hottest tech developments.
At the show, next-generation cellular technology known as 5G, which delivers data at mind-boggling speeds, is expected to take center-stage as one of the most important topics. We are also likely to see the evolution of smart homes, with internet-connected appliances such as refrigerators, televisions and vacuum cleaners working more seamlessly together — and with less human interaction required.
-----
How do machines think?
We have built AI systems that can do everything from diagnose our illnesses to drive our cars. But how can we trust them if we don’t understand them?
Philip Ball
Jan 3, 2020 — 12.00am
In November 2019, Leon Kowalski found himself in the offices of a large corporation in Los Angeles, answering some odd questions. “You’re in a desert. You look down and you see a tortoise…” When the questioner moved on to ask about his mother, things didn’t end well.
You might remember seeing this – but not in our world. It is the opening scene of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, released in 1982 and now no longer set in the future. Leon is a replicant, and the questioner, from the Tyrell Corporation that created him, is using the Voight-Kampff Test to distinguish him from a real human.
It’s a fictional modification of the Turing Test, first proposed (as the Imitation Game) by British mathematician Alan Turing in 1950 to study the question of whether machines can “think”. The best way, Turing suggested, would be to interrogate the machine as if it were human and observe how it behaved.
“Machine behaviour” is the next frontier in artificial intelligence (AI), bringing together computer scientists with neuroscientists, developmental psychologists and social scientists. It implicitly recognises that we’re already not sure what kind of reasoning our current AI uses, or how it relates to our own. The issue is no longer if a machine thinks, but how.
-----
Digital health in 2019 – an increasingly mature sector
January 2, 2020
Dominic Tyer looks at the technologies and stories that defined the year in digital health.
I’m tempted to proclaim 2019 as the year in which digital health grew up, but the truth is that as the sector continues to bring new technologies to healthcare, any definitive ‘coming of age’ moment is unlikely.
Nevertheless, while it may be following a continual learning curve, the digital health world certainly made some big strides towards maturing last year.
One noteworthy advance came from the World Health Organization (WHO), which released its first guidelines on digital health, challenging companies to prove they can improve people’s health and essential services.
Alongside this the WHO is discussing what shape a future roadmap for accelerating the digitisation of health systems in Europe should take.
-----
Scientist uses machine learning to help solve riddle of who wrote Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII
· The Times
Two authors, or not two authors? That is the question, and scientists are starting to provide an answer.
For decades scholars have debated how much of the verse attributed to Shakespeare was really his. Now “machine learning”, a branch of artificial intelligence, is settling the matter. Scientists have begun by analysing Henry VIII, which was written late in the Bard’s career.
For centuries he was assumed to be the sole author. In 1850, however, James Spedding, a literary editor, noticed striking similarities between the stylistic idiosyncrasies of John Fletcher, who succeeded Shakespeare as house playwright for the King’s Men acting company, and certain passages in Henry VIII.
-----
My Health Record ADHA Propaganda
My Health Record is a secure online summary of your health information.
My Health Record is used by Public hospitals and health services Private hospitals Diagnostic Imaging and pathology providers.
You can control what goes into it and who is allowed to access it. You can choose to share your health information with your doctors hospitals and other healthcare providers.
Having a My Health Record means your important health information like allergies current conditions and treatments medicine details pathology reports or diagnostic imaging scan reports can be digitally stored in one place.
-----
My Health Record is used by Public hospitals and health services Private hospitals Diagnostic Imaging and pathology providers.
You can control what goes into it and who is allowed to access it. You can choose to share your health information with your doctors hospitals and other healthcare providers.
Having a My Health Record means your important health information like allergies current conditions and treatments medicine details pathology reports or diagnostic imaging scan reports can be digitally stored in one place.
-----
Strip searches and ads: 10 tech and privacy hot spots for 2020
Umberto Bacchi
Dec 30, 2019 — 4.22pm
From whether governments should use facial recognition for surveillance to what data internet giants should be allowed to collect, 2019 was marked by a heated global debate around privacy and technology.
The Thomson Reuters Foundation asked 10 privacy experts what issues will shape the conversation in 2020.
1. In the US, California's digital privacy law:
"A California law giving consumers more control over their personal information, like the right to know what data businesses have collected about them, to delete it and to opt out of its sale, comes into effect on January 1, 2020," says Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
-----
Quantum computing 101: what's superposition, entanglement and a qubit?
Dec 27, 2019 — 12.09am
Quantum computers take strange, natural phenomena that scientists have been observing for more than a century, and harness them to process information.
What's superposition?
One phenomenon, known as “superposition”, is where subatomic particles appear to exist in multiple different states simultaneously.
A single photon of light, when beamed through a prism that sends half the light to the right and half the light to the left, will appear to travel both the right path and the left path at the same time.
The photon being in two places at once makes intuitive sense when you think of a photon as a wave of energy (which it is), but it seems strange when you think of a photon as a single particle (which it also is).
-----
The 'techlash' that never was: How internet giants rode the wave
By Matthew Field
December 30, 2019 — 11.00am
It was supposed to be the year of the "techlash" - a political, cultural and regulatory backlash against the world's biggest technology companies. Yet 2019's tidal wave did not quite break.
The movement has long been predicted: indeed, "techlash" was awarded digital word of the year by the American Dialect Society last January. It also made the shortlist of last year's Oxford English Dictionary (OED) words of the year.
Industry fears of a techlash were all the rage in late 2018 and well into 2019. From the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica scandal to shareholder revolts against Facebook, the phenomenon was perhaps most visible in the repeated grilling of technology chief executives before the US Congress and MPs in Parliament.
-----
The watch is smart, but it can't replace your doctor
By Aaron E. Carroll
December 29, 2019 — 12.54am
The Apple Watch has been quite successful as a smartwatch. The company would also like it to succeed as a medical device. The recently published results of the Apple Heart Study in the New England Journal of Medicine show there is still a long way to go.
An estimated 6 million people in the United States – nearly 2% – and 330,000 in Australia have atrial fibrillation, a type of irregular heartbeat that brings increased risk of events like clots, heart attacks and strokes. It is thought that about many people with the condition don't know they have it.
A selling point of the watch is a sensor that can monitor a wearer's pulse and potentially detect atrial fibrillation.
To test the device's ability to aid diagnosis, a group of researchers enrolled almost 420,000 Apple Watch wearers in a study. (Some of the researchers were Apple employees, and Apple sponsored the research.) Participants were monitored for about four months. Over that time, 2,161 of the study participants were notified of an irregular pulse, representing just over 0.5% of the sample.
-----
Comments more than welcome!
David.
No comments:
Post a Comment