MIT Media Lab

Cambridge, MA, USA

I had a great pleasure to participate in the Health and Wellness Innovation 2012 event at MIT Medial Lab. This yearly event was a 10-day project sprint in which teams built technologies to empower patients to become active participants in their care. It brings together academic researchers, innovators from industry, and progressive clinicians to accelerate progress and maximize collaboration. This was an opportunity to get some ideas into existence by prototyping an open-source telehealth solution.

TEAMS GETTING TO KNOW EACH OTHER AND THE PROJECTS

MIT Media Lab is "actively promoting a unique, antidisciplinary culture, the MIT Media Lab goes beyond known boundaries and disciplines, encouraging the most unconventional mixing and matching of seemingly disparate research areas. It creates disruptive technologies that happen at the edges, pioneering such areas as wearable computing, tangible interfaces, and affective computing". It is the place to be for technological innovation. The hackathon named Health and Wellness Innovation 2012 was unique as we were prototyping a working solution in under 10 days. I will present some of the organizations and people I had the honor to work with.

Centre for Innovation in Complex Care, University Health Network, is a research arm of the teaching hospital of the University of Toronto. I worked with two of their staff, Seema Marwaha and Christine Plaza, which were instrumental in directing my attention to the actual clinical needs that telehealth can address. Seema is a physician and a filmmaker with whom I discussed everything - from the clinical workflows to making short education videos (cheap to produce and easy to transfer to other countries, solving one of the main restraints we face). For example, on the Centre's website, you can see a short awarded movie about the necessity of handwashing in hospitals. I got remarkable insights into how things operate today and assurance that the Center is the place to implement innovations in the Canadian healthcare system.

The other company that I had an opportunity to work with is Fleury from Brazil. The Executive Director for Strategy, Rendrick Franco, was a part of the group and gave us a presentation of the organization and got us interested in their way of working with big data. Fleury, among other things, operates a telehealth center and collects economic data in conjunction with clinical data. As they understand the local needs of the emerging economies, which could be addressed using telehealth, I soaked in the presentations and learnings.

Hallmark sent 5 to 7 people to the event (varying daily). They have supported the event for 8 years now, but this is the first time their team has participated. The company operates in the "emotion" business. Revenue of $4 billion from sending cards of support commands respect. Hallmark's team was responsible for developing the 'app' while we provided the clinical and operational knowledge for the app to address medical needs. Tom Esselman, Breakthrough Exploration Leader (what a title!), was in charge of the team and a great help in streamlining the development process.

DR JOHN MOORE GAVE US A TOUR OF THE MEDIA LAB

One other member of our group was Julien Pham, a physician from the Brigham and Women's Hospital. Julian was looking for a telehealth platform that would allow him to track the progress of his patients on dialysis. He was indispensable in providing clinical expertise for our prototype. In addition, Julian took on a consultants role during the event.

Our diverse team created an interactive dashboard that changes with the change of patients' status and their progression through the healthcare cycle. As this work is deemed "confidential," I will not discuss it further. Unfortunately, we did not win the hackathon (the Asthma management project did), but we won friends and colleagues for the rest of the time.