Digital vaccine passports have become a contentious topic over the past few months. Whether you agree with their necessity or not, one thing’s become readily apparent: They are coming. But these passports may not take on the shape or format you imagined.

The U.S. government will not be implementing a vaccine passport. Instead, it is handing off the responsibilities of building and enforcing one to private enterprise. The reasoning behind this decision? Private organizations can solve this problem, faster, better, and more efficiently. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will be releasing guidelines for how to develop a vaccine passport in the coming weeks. But if you’re eager to get started on developing yours, we’ve got you covered.

In this blog post, we’ll give you a glimpse into our future with digital vaccine passports. We’ll also examine some of the common pitfalls that this paradigm is susceptible to. Lastly, we’ll round up this piece with a checklist that health tech developers should try their best to meet when creating a digital vaccine passport. Let’s get started!

Our (Near) Future With Digital Vaccine Passports

Whether you want to visit a certain country, partake in events like attending a concert, or work in a particular sector, it’s likely that you’ll have to demonstrate that you’ve received your COVID-19 vaccine in the near future. For example, unless they have very good reason to abstain from it, healthcare employees will need to be vaccinated to keep their jobs. This also goes for frontline workers across industries. Companies have the right to fire an employee or forgo renewing their contract if they have not been vaccinated.

Across the world, many organizations and countries are already taking action to implement vaccine passports and regulations of some kind. For instance, E.U. legislators recently proposed rules for a certificate system to verify the vaccine status of people moving between this union of 27 member countries. While those who pass these checkpoints can travel without the need for quarantine restrictions or additional tests, anyone who fails to comply with these regulations could be denied admittance or forced into quarantine.

While the concept of vaccine passports may seem stringent to some, its success is readily apparent in Israel. The country has issued “green passes” to citizens who are fully vaccinated. With this pass, people are free to eat at restaurants, socialize at bars, and attend concerts or sporting events. Public health experts believe that the country’s vaccine passport implementation has helped tremendously in keeping its COVID-19 numbers down and allowing its economy to reopen safely.

The arrival of vaccine passports will cause a big shift in society. After all, how do you really prove you’ve been vaccinated? In the U.S., people receive flimsy cards as proof. But these can potentially be forged and possibly lost. Well, that’s why vaccine passports are going digital. But there are still myriad pitfalls to address for this concept to be a success.

Potential Pitfalls of Digital Vaccine Passports

As we’ve alluded to with forgery, security is a prime concern when it comes to vaccine passports. But there’s also the potential issue of non-compliance. People as well as private and even public organizations may not follow the regulations that come with these passports. There’s also the question of fragmentation — as we witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic, each state took different measures to stave off this illness from spreading. If you were in Los Angeles, California, you probably had a drastically different experience than a citizen of Miami, Florida.

The problem of non-uniformity in vaccine passports only becomes magnified when you examine the entire world. Different vaccines are being distributed and used around the globe, and what’s permitted in one country may not be allowed in another. For example, China does not accept travelers who received the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. Such fragmentation between countries, along with the fact that digital vaccine passports will be developed by different organizations, could make things quite confusing.

Then there’s the question of time. Currently, there isn’t much data to go off of to see how long the COVID-19 vaccines are effective for. A quick Google search shows that there’s conflicting information regarding each specific vaccine’s efficacy against the COVID-19 variants circulating throughout the world. It’s likely that we’ll need to receive annual booster shots to ensure proper protection against this virus, so we’ll also need to factor in proof of these into passport iterations.

Clearly, several questions must be answered. While digital vaccine passports may differ from one another, there are a few key factors that all of them should possess.

Best Practices for Building a Digital Vaccine Passport

Here are some elements that every digital vaccine passport should have:

An Intuitive User Experience

A digital vaccine passport should be seamless to access and use. It should also enable the passport holder to easily disclose the minimum amount of information needed for verification. This can be difficult since the information required to be disclosed is dependent on the use case.

Privacy Protection Must Be Prioritized

Obviously, digital vaccine passports should be forgery-proof. But that’s only one segment of security in a long list of many. Be prudent and examine each component of your digital vaccine passport and every step required in a verification process. Identify any weak areas and ask yourself how you can strengthen them to ensure complete end-to-end privacy.

Build Trust Through Credibility and Transparency

Digital vaccine passports must strike a fine balance between information security and transparency. They must also work and be recognized across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries. Your solution should not only be multi-lingual but also credible enough that it’s recognized by various organizations such as airline companies and foreign governments. It should also be transparent enough to pass stringent requirements set forth by these organizations in a timely manner.

Data Portability

At the end of the day, digital vaccine passports are all about data. And developers of these passports must prioritize data portability. Passport holders should have complete control over the data they choose to share. Create your solution with granular data-sharing in mind so that users can easily compartmentalize and choose what information is displayed for various use cases.

Factoring In the Future

We believe that digital vaccine passports will become an essential part of humanity’s future. With that said, it’s vital for developers of these solutions to plan with the future in mind. This can be difficult to do since nobody knows what the future holds as far as health crises like the pandemic go. But it can help to examine the potential benefits that emerging technologies offer.

For instance, blockchain is a strong candidate for a tech stack that supports vaccine passports. it’s transparent, encrypted, and private. Not only does it store information securely, but you can choose who you share it with. And if you end up needing booster shots in the future to protect against COVID-19 variants, it can easily log that.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this overview of digital vaccine passports. What components would you like to see in these health tech solutions. As always, let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

COVID-19 brought many changes to our world over the past year, and healthcare and medicine were hit hardest by the pandemic as hospitals constantly scrambled to find enough personal protective equipment, hospital beds, and space to house infected patients during each surge. While hospitals were barely staying above water, providers and patients who weren’t infected were able to continue their appointments using telehealth technology. This technology is relatively new for most people, and it offers a variety of benefits.

Here are five changes caused by the pandemic for telehealth technology that you should know about.

1. Mass Usage of Telehealth Was Possible Only Because CMS Paid For It

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) acted swiftly to enable all patients and providers to use telehealth technology during the pandemic. They covered the unknown costs of payment parity, allowed payment for codes that were previously non-payable, and they worked with the Office for Civil Rights to waive HIPAA guidelines, allowing providers and patients to meet over Zoom and FaceTime for the first time ever. These regulatory flexibilities were invaluable and instrumental in helping telehealth get off the ground faster at the beginning of the pandemic.

While telehealth existed in several hospital systems before the pandemic, it was confined to specific areas like larger Easy Coast medical systems. Telehealth had a difficult time expanding “due to the lack of reimbursement and payment parity when there was reimbursement all,” according to Iris Berman. Berman is the vice president of telehealth services at Northwell Health, a New York City-based 23-hospital healthcare system. But CMS fixed this issue by directing much of the reimbursement to rural communities, allowing nationwide access to telehealth technologies.

2. Telehealth Offers A Safe Alternative to In-Person Care During the Pandemic

With telehealth, doctors are still able to attend to their patients who need medical attention at home. But telehealth technology has played an important role in inpatient care as well. Dr. Natalie Pageler is the chief medical information officer at Stanford Children’s Health and clinical professor of pediatric critical care at Stanford University.

Pageler says, “During [the pandemic], we also found ways to implement telehealth among our inpatients in the hospital. This allowed physicians to care for patients in isolation while minimizing the spread of infection and conserving personal protective equipment, such as masks and gowns.”

Many hospitals have also had to conference in specialists from other parts of the country that were experiencing fewer COVID-19 cases. This helped prevent hospitals from becoming even more overwhelmed with patients who did not truly need emergency care.

At Northwell Health, two telehealth platforms are being used to take care of inpatient care. These include eICU, which communicates with hardwired ICU beds that come with cameras, a monitor, speakers, and a button that alerts a remote critical care team. The other platform is DTC (direct to consumer), which is used for ER consultations, home televisits, and hospital floor care.

3. Telehealth Can Be More Convenient for Children and Pediatric Care

Childhood requires a higher-than-normal amount of medical care, and many of these visits can be conducted with telehealth. If a child isn’t in need of a vaccine, chronic condition check-ups, or regular testing, telehealth can save everyone some time and money. Pageler says that telehealth for pediatric services also enables children to see a doctor without missing school, sports, or extracurricular activities. Telehealth is also a great alternative to in-person follow-up appointments when possible.

4. Telehealth Is Now a Necessity

Dr. Peter Antall is the chief medical officer of Amwell, a telemedicine platform based in Boston. He says that Amwell’s monthly visit volume went up by 300% between April and June when compared to visitor counts from January to March. Antall says that telehealth is now a necessity and no longer a nice-to-have tool in the healthcare journey.

He added, “We expect this momentum to largely continue post-pandemic. … You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Now that both patients and providers have experienced the convenience of telehealth, we don’t anticipate healthcare to ever go back to how it was.”

Pageler agrees that “we won’t return to the baseline we were at before the pandemic” because providers and patients now “see the value and incentive to continue using virtual visits.” Telehealth offers benefits like cutting travel time, reduced scheduling, and better access to specialists, among others. According to research conducted by McKinsey & Co., 74% of telehealth users were “highly satisfied”, 64% of providers are more comfortable using it than before the pandemic, and 57% of providers saw telehealth more favorably than they did before the pandemic.

5. There’s Still a Growing Digital Divide

As a medical application, experts argue, nuanced information and the human connection are missing from telehealth appointments. They also worry that telehealth is creating a deeper digital divide between patient populations. For patients who have regular, stable access to Wi-Fi and updated devices, telehealth is just a new technology in their toolbelt.

But, according to the Federal Trade Commission, 19 million Americans don’t have access to fixed broadband service at minimum threshold speeds. This encompasses many rural patients. Additionally, Pew Research estimated that 19% of Americans don’t have a smartphone. Many patients who most desperately need telehealth technology are boxed out of it due to having unstable or slow Internet connections and a lack of suitable devices.

Telehealth Isn’t Going Anywhere

Telehealth has proven itself to be an indispensable technology for patients and providers alike. Although it shines a light on ongoing problems, like rural populations’ lack of access to care, technology, and stable Internet, it brings about many more benefits by far. The pandemic may have negatively impacted the world in more than one way, but it also brought us the normalization of widespread telehealth usage. Telehealth technology has enabled patients around the world to stay safe and healthy during the pandemic.

Have you used telehealth technology to speak to your doctor during the pandemic? Share your telehealth experience with us in the comments below!

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated a change in patient care, from simple check-ups to psychiatric help. As a result, patients, practitioners, and providers have had to quickly pivot and adapt to the changing times. And although most medical needs were met adequately with the technology we have already, some parts of medical care have not remained accessible and helpful for patients as in-office care.

These areas of concern include mental health care and support, like the delivery of group-based therapies, education, and psychotherapy. Because they are reliant on the patient and provider sitting down together, communicating via body language and other non-verbal cues, and interacting without any outside distraction, mental health aspects of healthcare are more difficult to outfit with the right technology.

In short, our current technologies (like telehealth video conferencing and telephone) don’t work as well as they should for patients requiring mental health and support. But new strides in virtual reality (VR) could change the landscape of medical applications and healthcare delivery for the foreseeable future.

Extending Virtual Reality

VR has been most recently associated with gaming, seeing real estate without stepping foot inside a new building, and even medical training. But in order to extend the closeness of real-life human interaction into VR, we need to extend the reality. We need to enhance our virtual interactions with new tools and close the gap in virtual therapy so that it remains effective and high-quality even as a remote service.

Extended reality is a real technology term that encompasses VR, mixed reality, and augmented reality in a spectrum of various levels of immersion. These three technologies themselves offer various levels of immersion, from mixed and augmented reality allowing the user to see their real-world surroundings with an overlay on a screen to VR which creates a new reality using headphones and body-tracking sensors. VR is the most advanced, mature, studied, and available technology of the three.

VR’s early days included use in applications for medical care and education in the 1990s, which brings us back full circle to today. Since the 90s, VR has been used in healthcare settings for pain control, education, anxiety, exposure therapy, and even to manage the fear of death. Studies show that VR creates a literal change in perspective, creates neural correlates to manage and numb pain, and reduces pain-related brain activity in several parts of the brain.

Additionally, research shows that exposure therapy using VR has had direct, measurable effects on the prefrontal cortex, which plays a major role in cognitive and behavioral activities. These changes are similar to the effect of in-person exposure therapy on the patient.

A Perfect Companion for Telehealth?

When VR was still a young technology, it required expensive, immobile setups using computers, headphones, cameras, and sensors. But these days, consumer-ready headsets are widely available, and they remove the need for cameras and computers. The current state of VR is perfect for studying VR’s potential in telehealth and telepsychiatry.

The Adolescent and Young Adult (AYA) Oncology department at the Yale-New Haven Hospital has begun researching how VR engages AYA patients in support groups. New York City-based VR firm Foretell Reality designed and developed software for the AYA project, and it runs on readily-available $400 Oculus Quest headsets. Four patients attend each support group session using their Oculus headsets.

The patients can attend from anywhere that has Wi-Fi or a cellular data connection. They virtually enter a therapeutically-curated space and sit in a circle with a moderator and the other participants. Each session lasts for 45 to 60 minutes, and each patient must attend six total sessions. The study consisted of five support groups, making it a total of 20 patients. The research team says that the initial results are very promising.

Overcoming Longstanding Obstacles

But there are some challenges to overcome. For example, the team had to ensure physical and emotional safety for all of the patients. Things like motion sickness or triggers could lead to further care or even suicidal thoughts. Headsets had to be sterilized between uses. And the tech industry part of the team clashed with the academic part of the team on timelines and urgency.

Metrics were designed before the study took place to measure depression, resilience, and anxiety before and after the VR experience. Early results show that patients performed well with lower anxiety levels and higher resilience. Attendance to the virtual group support meetings has been steady.

Patients have been encouraged to share their thoughts and ideas with the team, and the team has been grateful for the user feedback. Many patients have stated that they feel more comfortable meeting with the rest of the group when they’re feeling ill. Some patients have noted the need to take a break when their headset starts to feel heavy. Others have asked for more robust and dynamic avatars to represent themselves. And quite a few patients have expressed interest in meeting their support group in-person after their six sessions are completed.

Finding Patients

When the team is done analyzing the AYA group’s findings, they plan to expand their research with a larger, multi-institutional Phase 2 trial. In the second trial, the team hopes to assess risk, dig into the benefits of VR-based mental health support groups, and work with a larger and more diverse patient population. The AYA group was a great starting point because the patients were young, technologically-savvy, and willing to learn a new technology.

But research from other studies shows that elderly patients have performed well in virtual grief counseling, even with their propensity to not pick up new technology as fast or as enthusiastically. VR has the potential to change the lives of patients who live with rare diseases and away from adequate medical care. But the research team at Yale-New Haven worries about rural and lower socioeconomic populations that lack access to a stable, high-speed internet connection.

Coming Soon to VR Goggles Near You

The team hopes that emerging technologies like 5G and Space X’s Starlink system will provide better internet access to underserved populations, allowing VR to be a realistic therapeutic option for anyone who is interested in trying it out.

Would you attend a support group meeting with a VR headset? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments below!

The pandemic has changed many industries, but the field most affected by the coronavirus has been healthcare and medicine. As hospitals scrambled to accommodate the high numbers of emergency room and intensive care unit visits, telehealth grew extremely quickly to complement physical contact with hospitals and doctors. In fact, telemedicine grew so rapidly that The Mayo Clinic estimates the field grew ten years of progress within six to eight weeks.

As a result, things have moved too fast for insurance companies to organize their billing claims appropriately, creating a lack of transparency in how medical services are billed and reimbursed. Although telemedicine provides tremendous value for both patients and providers, doubt and confusion are rampant in the state of healthcare today. And for providers who were already opportunistic and predatory, the relaxation, elimination, and suspension of rules during the pandemic have created a massive playing ground for large-scale fraud.

Before the Pandemic

Fraud related to telemedicine before the pandemic was a sign of what could happen if we implemented telehealth on a much bigger scale. Whether it was one-off fraud or constant scheming, the most hurt groups were single-payer systems like Medicare and Tricare which consistently were victimized by telemedicine scams. Marketers would get together insurance beneficiaries and market them as telemedicine companies, giving them access to providers over the phone.

The “telemedicine company” would then recommend expensive drugs, medical equipment, and diagnostics to the physician. The cost of these scams? Just one nationwide scam before the pandemic, which involved free or low-cost orthotic braces, created $1.2 billion in false billing claims.

Before the pandemic, medical applications like telehealth technology were used to help under-served rural patients get in touch with their doctors. It was also used to “store and forward” important medical information, like radiological images. HIPAA rules regarding the technology were strict, and a HIPAA-secure connection was required. If you were a patient who was going to meet with your provider, you had to be at a pre-approved origination site, and your provider had to be at a pre-approved distant site. You also were required to speak on an audio-visual connection. But it’s well-known that American healthcare rules and regulations change daily, and it changed much more drastically when the pandemic arrived.

After the Pandemic

There’s been no question about extending telemedicine technology to everyone during the pandemic. Because of the fast timing, HIPAA and privacy concerns on telehealth platforms were largely relaxed to accommodate the massive influx of patients and providers. Today, video isn’t even required during telehealth appointments.

You can speak to your provider over the phone or over the computer. Patients now send private clinical and medical data directly to their providers. But this has created confusion and uncertainty about how to bill for medical services.

Before the pandemic, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) allowed only 101 telehealth services. On March 30, 2020, an additional 85 services were added. A month later, 51 new services were added. This brought up the total from 101 to 241 within a month.

No one knows how long the lax rules of telehealth will last after the pandemic is over. And no one has information about if telehealth will be shrunken down again as a service offered to a select group of patients. The Chicago-based American Medical Association also added to the confusion and chaos by releasing new billing codes and descriptors for telehealth services. But one thing is clear: there was likely massive fraud committed in 2020, and many schemes are still active.

Chaotic, Confusing, and Challenging

Because of the relationship of the American government with states, there are no two states that have the same healthcare guidelines and delivery regulations. State regulation depends on a variety of factors, like if the telehealth technology uses live video or just email/fax/phone or if it offers store-and-forward services, remote patient monitoring, or originating/remote site restrictions. It also depends on whether online prescribing and coding is happening, what geographic locations are offered, and what the form of consent looks like. 35 states have parity laws that require telehealth billing to be reimbursed at the same rate as in-office visits.

Identifying and analyzing telehealth claims doesn’t usually result in any actionable insights. Workers’ compensation, disability carriers, and union welfare trusts are particularly at risk for being bamboozled. When you look at the fraudulent claims singularly, they look legitimate and payable, which provides more fuel for the scam and involved fraudsters. In fact, fraudulent claims and legitimate claims are difficult to distinguish because the scammer won’t disclose that the service was provided through telehealth technology.

What’s worse is that advanced automation technology, like fraud detection algorithms, sophisticated analytics software, and previously-trained billing and clinical data applications, cannot catch the hundreds of physicians that scammers pay under the table. Bills are spread out over hundreds of payers, resulting in even more chaos and confusion, and this negatively affects any analysis because the volume is too low to analyze.

The Future of Medicine

Medical fraud has always been a part of healthcare in the U.S., especially because of the obfuscation created by adding more complexity into an already complicated system. Insurance companies must help sort out these scams moving forward, rather than remaining passive and reactive bystanders. If we don’t prepare now, we’ll have to pay much more later on.

Telehealth has changed how we treat and care for those who have medical maladies and are vulnerable. The latest innovations in this field are enabling people to live safer, fuller lives without the need for constant human supervision. The COVID-19 pandemic has made this abundantly clear; more healthcare facilities than ever before are embracing telemedicine in an effort to keep patients from in-person appointments that risk exposure to the deadly virus.

Recent telehealth innovations such as wearables heavily rely on the Internet of Things. With this technological paradigm, we can securely transmit and analyze data in order to unearth life-improving care plans. These capabilities allow aging populations to continue to live in their own homes while reducing the burden that many care facilities are experiencing at the moment. In this post, we’ll examine the benefits of furthering telehealth connectivity innovation and the factors needed to make it happen.

Enabling Patient Independence

Good connectivity is essential for three types of telehealth monitoring: passive, active, and condition.

Passive monitoring deals with medical applications and technologies in the patient’s home that quietly monitor his or her behavior. These devices usually only initiate action if they notice something concerning. For instance, the Alcuris Memo Hub connects a variety of smart devices around a patient’s home, like a tea kettle, TV, and lighting. If this platform notices a change in the patient’s typical pattern of behavior, it will issue an alert. It can also observe and trigger an alert for gradual changes that may indicate a revision to a health regimen is required.

Active monitoring entails devices such as panic buttons and two-way intercoms. In summation, these devices require proactive action, either from the patient or a caretaker.

Lastly, as its name implies, condition monitoring involves the monitoring of specific health conditions. It combines aspects of the first two approaches we’ve discussed with detailed health data, like blood pressure, heart rate, and movement.

Simplicity Is Essential

Digital health innovations help improve the quality of life for aging populations as well as patients living with chronic conditions and disabilities. They also help lower the costs and resources needed for adequate healthcare delivery for these cases.

Ensuring that telehealth devices have enough connectivity to reliably capture, share, and analyze data is absolutely necessary. Without proper connectivity, wrong conclusions (and consequently, outcomes) could be reached. But these connected devices need one more feature to take telehealth to the next level: the ability to work right out of the box.

Telehealth device manufacturers should configure their devices to seamlessly connect to a healthcare provider’s system seamlessly without any complexities. They should also be able to work anywhere, whether that’s Beijing or Los Angeles. Making telehealth devices and platforms plug-and-play is imperative since a large portion of their audience may not be tech-savvy or have the time to set up complicated systems.

Overcoming Connectivity Obstacles

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, chances are good that you have some experience with mobile phones. This means you’re also painfully familiar with the occurrence of black spots where your mobile device can’t receive a strong, reliable signal. Can you imagine this conundrum for a device that your life depends on?

When a patient’s life is on the line, we cannot compromise on connectivity. To mitigate this issue, telehealth devices should be capable of selecting the best network based on its location and even change between networks to minimize drop-out time. During a critical moment, a dropped connection can mean the difference between life and death. So any device in the telehealth market should offer strong, reliable, and continuous connectivity.

To ensure optimal connectivity, medical device makers must consider its importance from the start of the design process. This often translates to a few common factors for the device. For example, it must be lightweight, easy to operate, robust, and unobtrusive. Often, these elements restrict the design of these devices, which is something that manufacturers may have not dealt with before if they previously focused on larger or fixed devices.

On top of this, manufacturers must also think through what occurs at the back end of their telehealth devices. Do they connect to a cloud service through which analyses are run? Or is the data being transmitted to another human who needs convenient access to it? In this case, how should the information be presented? Alongside connectivity, this focus on communication must also be considered at the beginning of the design stage.

Don’t Forget Security

End-to-end security is always crucial for anything that handles sensitive data such as telehealth devices. Whether it’s your hardware or software, all of your connectivity platforms must be secured properly in order for your device to work effectively.

Unfortunately, several consumer SIMs lack advanced security protocols. They actually send data over standard internet channels, which increases the risk of this information being stolen or lost. To mitigate this, prioritize security early on in the device design phase.

Numerous IoT manufacturers treat device security as an afterthought. As we know from the IoT industry’s track record with data breaches, this has not worked out well. The same mistakes cannot be made when it comes to the personal data of patients.

Dedicated end-to-end security solutions are usually the best for telehealth devices. This involves measures such as data encryption at the device level, communication through trusted private networks and secure gateways, authentication, and authorization.

If you want to take things a step further (which is never a bad idea), add in data flow monitoring tools to detect any unusual activity. These could be your first indicators of a malicious attack taking place. Lastly, consider consulting a third-party pen tester before deployment.

Are You Ready for the Future of Telehealth?

We hope you’ve enjoyed this overview of how connectivity can help accelerate telehealth innovation. It may not be the first topic that comes to mind when you think of new capabilities in digital medicine, but it’s certainly among the most important. By emphasizing connectivity during the design of a telehealth device, you’re able to give patients and providers more peace of mind and unlock better outcomes for both parties.

Have you had any unusual experiences with telehealth connectivity? As always, let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

The research sounds like it can be expanded by introducing more social media platforms and more types of user-generated content, but these findings are not without criticism. Experts not involved with the research say that this medical application of AI may seem promising, but that it does not and should not replace clinicians in diagnosing illness.

The Algorithm’s Skeleton

Using an AI algorithm, the researchers extracted specific details from messages and photos that each volunteer posted. For example, swear words in messages indicate mental illness in general, while words related to negative emotions and words of perception (see, touch, listen) were linked to schizophrenia. And blue tones in photos were indicative of mood disorders. Using these existing traits, the researchers grouped each person into a prediction category: schizophrenia, mood disorder (like depression or bipolar), or no mental health issues.

To test the algorithm’s efficacy, the team used a metric that calculates a trade-off between false negatives and false positives. An algorithm with no false positives and no false negatives (a perfect algorithm) gets a score of 1. On the other hand, an algorithm that guesses randomly gets a score of 0.5. The researchers’ algorithm performed in the range of 0.65 and 0.77, which indicates that the algorithm is on the right track.

When the research team restricted the algorithm from looking at content unless it was posted in the past year, the performance was still better than randomly diagnosing users. H. Andrew Schwartz is a computer science professor at Stony Brook University who did not help with the study. He says that the results of the researchers’ algorithm are similar to those you would get from taking the PHQ-9, which is a 10-question survey used to screen for depression.

The research team was led by Michael Birnbaum, a professor at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research located just outside of New York City. Birnbaum says that this type of AI algorithm can have a huge positive impact on the treatment of psychiatric illnesses. According to Birnbaum, psychiatrists have the tendency to work with patients after they’re diagnosed, but the research could help find people who are feeling symptoms much earlier, allowing them to get help before things get worse.

Mining Social Media

Although Birnbaum’s team isn’t the first to use an AI application to detect mental illnesses, they’re the first to work directly with the users as patients. Other studies asked their patients to take the PHQ-9 survey, self-diagnose, or take their word for their diagnosis, but Birnbaum’s team worked with patients who had an official diagnosis from a clinician. Using the date of the professional diagnosis, the team worked backward to find indications of mental illness before the patient had a confirmed diagnosis.

Although Sharath Guntuku, a computer science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, doesn’t think that we’ll be using social media to mine for clues of mental illness as a professional diagnosis any time soon, he says that the algorithm designed by Birnbaum’s team could be a crucial tool in the mental health field. And “what we are increasingly looking at is using these as a complementary data source to flag people at risk and to see if they need additional care or additional contact from the clinician,” he says.

Schwartz agrees with this sentiment, adding that diagnosing mental illness isn’t an exact science, but that more data could definitely improve the accuracy of each diagnosis. “The idea is, you’re triangulating mental health. Assessing mental health is an exercise that can’t just rely on one single tool,” Schwartz says. Adding social media data into the mix can help clinicians bolster the hour per week they spend with their patients, allowing them to get a better (and maybe even clearer) look at their patient’s thoughts and feelings.

And according to Guntuku, some social media platforms are already taking it upon themselves to help catch users who may be feeling symptoms. For example, if someone searches for suicide-related keywords on Google, the search engine will show the phone number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline before the search results. Facebook is constantly watching for posts that indicate suicide risk and flagging them for human moderation. If the moderator agrees that the user may be at risk, Facebook can contact law enforcement while sending the user resources for suicide prevention. Either way, Guntuku says, “Any sort of public, large-scale mental health detection, at the level of individuals, is very tricky and very ethically risky.”

Digitalizing Mental Health Awareness

Birnbaum is a clinician, and he sees social media as an impactful data source for therapists to hone in on a diagnosis. After the diagnosis, social media data can be used to monitor and follow patients while they engage in long-term treatment plans. In psychiatry, Birnbaum says, clinicians are lucky to get a snapshot of the patient’s progress once a month, so “incorporating this type of information really allows us to get a more comprehensive, more contextual understanding of somebody’s life.”

Birnbaum has hope that social media will become a part of psychiatry in the next five to ten years. He envisions a day when “digital data and mental health will really combine, and this will be our X-ray into somebody’s mind.”

From their inception, it was immediately obvious that wearables had immense potential to improve how we interact with medical apps. These sleek and stylish devices could not only make technology more widely accessible, but they could also allow us to understand our own health in a more intimate, digestible way. Dogtown Media has always striven to keep up and innovate with the latest developments in wearable technology. That’s why we’re so excited and honored to announce that we’ve recognized as a top wearable app developer of 2020 by TopDevelopers.co!

Since we opened our doors in 2011, the wearables market has witnessed unprecedented growth. The explosive popularity of these devices has led to countless advancements which now present endless opportunities for augmenting preventative medicine. With that said, it’s safe to say that the days of viewing wearables as mere fitness trackers are over — this technology can give you a comprehensive picture of your health that wasn’t possible only a few years ago.

Wearables unlock insights that allow anyone to take better control of their health. They can also elucidate better ways for medical experts to manage maladies. It’s no exaggeration to say that these benefits are priceless. But this is really just the beginning; we expect wearables to radically expand in functionality and capability over the next few years.

TopDevelopers.co assessed several wearable app developers to identify the pioneers in this field. Ultimately, they had to drastically cut down their list of candidates to companies that demonstrated not only substantial experience in this field but also a proven track record of consistent client satisfaction. We’re extremely proud that our Los Angeles-based development studio made the cut!

Besides being recognized as a top wearable app developer of 2020, Dogtown Media has also had the pleasure of being featured as one of the best B2B service providers in California by Clutch as well as a leading IoT app developer by TopDevelopers.co!

At a time when it has become painfully clear that more medical innovation is sorely needed, we’re committed to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with wearable technology. We’d like to extend our thanks to TopDevelopers.co once again for recognizing our work. We’d also like to thank our clients, team, and community — we couldn’t have done it without you!

Who is TopDevelopers.co?

TopDevelopers.co is a widely respected directory and review platform for B2B IT service providers. They take a neutral approach to analyzing companies. The team of analysts at TopDevelopers.co vets organizations through stringent parameters which ensure that only the most competitive firms, businesses, enterprises, and entrepreneurs are filtered through their process. This helps service seekers find the most appropriate solutions for their needs.

The most impactful method of contact-tracing was manual and arduous, but it helped Pond and her team bring down the number of cases in the county. However, says, Pond, “It’s been difficult, and it’s taking a lot longer than we thought. We’re a tiny little health department, and we’re just trying to do this on our own.” Pond isn’t alone; many counties across the country are feeling left behind, exhausted, and over-burdened. So why hasn’t contact-tracing taken off across the U.S.?

Surging Cases and a Lack of Organization

In the U.S., over 200,000 citizens (officially — unofficially, it’s hypothesized to be twice as much) have died because of anti-maskers, lack of proper contact tracing, and opening bars and restaurants, as well as allowing big events like weddings to continue to take place. For many areas, a COVID-19 test appointment can be arranged for a few days or weeks later. Couple this with test results taking 3-5 business days (or more during surges), and you might go through the most severe of the symptoms before even heading out for a test.

Contact tracing requires rapid, plentiful, and cheap testing so action can be swiftly taken to quarantine the infected and notify those who came into contact with the infected. But the U.S. lacks the capacity to administer millions of tests each day. In Europe, by contrast, because of public healthcare systems, mapping contact tracing apps to healthcare records was extremely easy. In the U.S., each state has different software and rules for patient records, and of course, medical care is privatized.

It’s also incredibly confusing in the U.S. who manages which jurisdiction. Sometimes it’s the federal government, a university, a county, a city, or a region. Tim Brookins is the lead developer for the Care19 app, a contact-tracing app that is being used in Wyoming and North Dakota. He says that the apps aren’t the problem; that falls on “the fractured nature of contact tracing and the political issues. That’s the mess.”

Ever-Changing Approaches

When Apple and Google first released their Bluetooth contact-tracing technology in April, they wanted to give each state the opportunity to select developers to create contact-tracing apps using Bluetooth technology. One major caveat was that each state would have to pick one developer each to grant the permissions to. But out of 50 states, only 6 signed up for this plan.

Recently, the two companies acknowledged that they made a mistake in utilizing the technology on a state-by-state basis. Now, Apple will build contact tracing into its operating system, while Google will develop custom apps for each state. But because the national healthcare infrastructure is severely lacking organization and robustness, this approach may be useless too.

A Trinity College Dublin study found that the Apple-Google technology was inconsistent on buses and trains because of interference. The authors suggested that the tracing definitions should change from within 6 feet for 10 minutes, rather than 15 minutes. But the technology has been picked up by several countries around the world: Germany, the UK, Ireland, and Switzerland. It’s not clear how many people in a population have to use the app for the app to be effective. An Oxford University research study concluded that 60% would be the number to stop an outbreak, but that Ireland’s and Switzerland’s adoption rates can help lower infection rates (40% and 35%, respectively).

According to Carmela Troncoso, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, government support for contact tracing is vital for citizens to adopt it. Unfortunately, in the U.S., we’re not aligned nationally, state-wide, and sometimes within each town.

Politics and Mistrust Take Center Stage

Many states tried early on to create a contact-tracing app, but either state politics or low adoption rates stopped them from progressing any further. As a result, the states’ case numbers keep going up, past the point where state officials could manually trace residents. For many states, officials are struggling to develop a proper public health response at all. For other states that ramped up their contact-tracing efforts, testing ability didn’t ramp up accordingly to meet the demands.

According to a George Washington University study, many states are lacking contact tracers: California needs more than 30,000 tracers to join in the effort, but they’ve only got less than 10,000 to work with right now. As for contact tracers, difficulties faced on the job include people not picking up their phone, people not following their advice and seeking testing, and people not listening because childcare and other resources aren’t being offered.

People also mistrust the government. Margaret Bourdeaux, a researcher at Boston-based Harvard Kennedy School, says, “Public trust is everything during a health crisis, so anything that might risk it—especially if the benefit is unclear—is viewed as not worth the effort.”

Coordinating a National Response

It’s clear that the state-by-state initiative needs to pivot into an overarching national response. Because we don’t have a nationalized or universal healthcare system, we are overall very ill-prepared to handle the coronavirus pandemic with a coordinated response. But Scott Becker, the executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL), says, “We are not Canada. It would be a lot simpler if there were a national approach, but that’s not how public health works in the United States.”

Becker joined a group of officials that included technologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state health officers to create a strategy to tackle the problem of contact tracing in the U.S. Obviously, one of the first things discussed was allowing states to communicate with each other. A national response would handle the communication better than states would, especially for states that attract tourists from all over the country, like Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park.

Besides, each state having its own server of private location and identifiable information is just a major cybersecurity incident waiting to happen, and something like that would further shatter the public’s trust in not only the federal government but also their state and local governments as well. To help combat this risk, the APHL set up a common server for state apps to communicate with each other. Google’s state-specific apps, named Exposure Notification Express, are mostly all the same, but states can send the company a wish-list of features they want in their app, along with state-wide branding.

Staying in Contact with Local Officials

Connecting with local health officials has been difficult, according to Brookins. “The real friction is the way the contact tracing happens. It’s the haphazard, heterogenous jurisdictions that are difficult,” he says. As for Pond, she feels that there are more important things to tackle before implementing Care19 in her county. But in her local response in tracing the virus in Teton County, every tool she has in her belt could make a real difference for her residents.

Have you used any contact-tracing apps? Let us know which state and if you think it’s making a difference!

Does this message resonate with you? We feel definitely feel your struggle, and we want to help you get on the right track. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of our favorite mental health apps. They offer guidance for better sleep, meditation practice, habit management, and more — all from the palm of your hand.

Free Yourself with Enso [iOS]

Enso is a simple, uncluttered app that helps you improve your meditation habit. It leads you through sitting in meditation for a few minutes without any distractions. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned meditator, you’ll enjoy the quiet and calm that Enso brings: there’s no music or voices to follow or get hung up on. Set the timer, hit start, and meditate until the timer runs out.

If you’re a more experienced meditator, you can further customize your sessions with multiple bells to mark prep time, sitting time, and interval rounds. Upgrade for $2.99 for even more features, like an in-app audio player for custom meditation jingles, an Apple Health integration, and extra alert sounds to customize your multiple bells and timers.

Unfortunately, this app is only available on the Apple App Store for mobile and tablet devices. There don’t seem to be any plans to create an Android version, but if you’d really like this app in the Google Play Store, message the Enso team and let them know!

Get Better Zzzs with Pzizz [iOS, Android]

You’re probably wondering how to pronounce the name of this app. It’s “puh-zizz”, according to this app’s website. Pzizz doesn’t just help you fall asleep better; it also helps you get to bed in a more relaxed manner. The app uses audio, speech, and music clips based on sleep research to help you fall asleep or just get relaxed and ready for some downtime for however long you want the downtime to last.

You can adjust the audio mix of sounds if a voice helps you fall asleep faster or if instrumental music does the job better. With the premium version of this app, you can unlock a much bigger library of clips and guided sleep and relaxation experiences.

Sleep Deeper with Dark Noise [iOS]

This wildly popular and beautiful app offers a variety of white noise sounds for anything in your life: reading a book, focusing on writing, taking a long walk, and even sleeping. The audio it offers includes heavy rain, crickets, waterfalls, coffee shops, wind chimes, and white, brown, grey, and pink noises.

With this amount of options, you can use this app all day, in a lot of different contexts: distraction, drowsy, focused, and meditation name just a few. The app also includes a “sleep timer” that shuts off the app after a certain amount of time has passed. Dark Noise is only available for Apple users, and there are no concrete plans to bring this app to Google’s Play Store.

Personalized Sound with Endel [iOS, Android, Web]

A competitor of Dark Noise, Endel is another popular app for creating personalized sound environments for a variety of contexts: sleep, focus, relax, and even flying. The app offers four modes that can work for any task or activity you might be up to; the relax mode calms you down by making you feel comfortable and safe, the focus mode boosts productivity and concentration, the on-the-go mode adapts the sound to your personal tempo, and the sleep mode soothes you into a slumber.

Doctor using a smart phone with copy space. Concept of healthcare and medical, communication.

With more platforms offered than Dark Noise, Endel is a favorite for third-party integrations with the Apple Watch, Alexa, car manufacturers, and retail spaces. Catch this app on almost any platform or device, and let us know how you like it.

Level Up Your Habits with Habitica [iOS, Android, Web]

Habitica made waves when it first launched as a unique app that gamified habit tracking. It provides motivation to check off your habits and goals on a daily basis with your custom-created RPG character. Your character attacks enemies (a.k.a. procrastination) for you and levels up whenever you check off your tasks and accomplishments, like errands, habits, and daily activities.

Connect your Habitica character to your friends’, and boost your experience with more fun features, like accountability and social networking. Even if you’d prefer to go alone, there are prizes and gear in store for your character. Log onto the web app and see a detailed dashboard of your stats, character avatar, and much more.

Chat With Someone on BetterHelp [iOS, Android, Web]

San Francisco-based BetterHelp lends an ear to anyone who needs someone to talk to right now. This app is heaven-sent for many during the COVID-19 pandemic since it’s been difficult to get medical appointments for anything that isn’t urgent or emergent. The BetterHelp app helps you reach a licensed counselor or psychologist through video, phone, or text. Take a quiz to see which type of therapist is the best fit for you, and BetterHelp will guide you to the right person.

The best part about this app is that you don’t need insurance to get in touch with someone who can help. Pricing ranges from $40 to $70 per month, and payment opens up a vault of over 10,000 therapists and counselors to talk with. To be a counselor or therapist on BetterHelp, you must have over three years of therapy experience.

You Can’t Have “Happiness” Without “App”

It turns out our mobile phones aren’t only for social media and checking emails; these devices can help us improve our mental and physical health. You just have to take the first step and give it a try.

Have you downloaded and tested any of the apps we listed? Do you have any favorite mental health apps that we didn’t include? Let us know what you think!

When Dogtown Media first opened its doors in 2011, we knew that wearables were something special; it was immediately obvious that these devices held immense potential for improving how we interact with medical apps and our own health. Since those early days, we’ve striven to keep up and innovate with the latest developments in this technology.

And it appears our hard work is paying off — TopDevelopers.co has recognized Dogtown Media as a leading wearable app developer!

Over the past few years, it’s been a pleasure to watch the growth of the wearables market. The sharp increase in the usage of wearable devices has been accompanied by numerous possibilities being opened up for medicine. This technology is no longer just for simple fitness tracking. Wearables can now give you a holistic perspective of your health.

Such insights enable anyone to take control of their health and shine a light on better ways for doctors to manage medical maladies. These advantages are priceless. But perhaps most surprising is that this is just the tip of the iceberg of what wearables are capable of; expect the features of these devices to expand in a multitude of ways over the next few years.

TopDevelopers.co evaluated numerous wearable app developers to identify the pioneers in this field. Ultimately, they had to trim down their list to organizations with substantial experience in this niche and a long history of consistent client satisfaction. It’s an absolute honor that our Los Angeles-based development studio made the cut!

Besides being dubbed a top wearable app developer, Dogtown Media was also recently named a top U.S. mobile app developer by TopDevelopers.co. We were also fortunate to be lauded as one of California’s leading app developers by Clutch!

At a time where it has become readily apparent that more medical innovation is sorely needed, we’re proud to say that we’ll keep on trying our best to push the boundaries of what’s possible with wearable technology.

Thanks so much to TopDevelopers.co for recognizing us. We’d also like to thank our clients, team, and community — we couldn’t have done it without you!

Who is TopDevelopers.co?

TopDevelopers.co is a widely respected directory and review platform for B2B IT service providers. They take a neutral approach to analyzing companies. The team of analysts at TopDevelopers.co vets organizations through stringent parameters which ensure that only the most competitive firms, businesses, enterprises, and entrepreneurs are filtered through their process. This helps service seekers find the most appropriate solutions for their needs.