Algonquian birchbark canoe building

Robert Twigger shared a video on his Facebook page about how Indian peoples (in this case Algonquian peoples) built birchbark canoes. The video is really old (1947) but that's what makes it so special.

Robert has written several absolutely awesome real life explorer/adventure books. My favourite so far has been Angry White Pyjamas, because he writes about several Aikido masters that I also had the privilege to study with! Another of the most incredible tales was Voyageur: Across the Rocky Mountains in a Birchbark Canoe. Leave it to a Brit do so something so audaciously Canadian!

Canoe trips have always been in my blood since I was a child. The romance of the "coureur du bois" or "voyageurs" was part of our elementary school Canadian history curriculum and I read books about Radisson and Grosseillers.  Because our house was on the edge of a large forest we used to practice running through the woods as fast as we could, jumping or climbing over fallen trees.

I learned how to canoe fairly early in life at the Northern Ontario cottage our family owned. In those days the lakes were more pristine and on short canoe trips we could put a detoxifying pill in our boiled lake water to make it potable for cereal, dried foods and tea. I later learned expert skills on how to travel on longer canoe trips at YMCA summer camp. In my early and middle teens I made several 2 week canoe trips into Northern lakes near Algonquian park with a friend. These trips involved carrying our own food, boiling our own lake water, portaging and camping in off the beaten track lake areas. With only that small experience, I can fully appreciate the astounding birchbark canoe trek Robert Twigger made across the far north of Canada.

Later in life I was living north of Ottawa on the way to the traditional Algonquian hunting and fishing territory near Maniwaki Quebec - very much I suspect where this video was filmed. I visited reserves and heard teachings from their elders - some of whom carried on this same tradition of birchbark canoe making. This old video features those same peoples, albeit it is 1947 or something like that. The singing at the beginning is French Canadian but I think it is has Algonquian language in it as well - not sure.  I bought a few books about building birchbark canoes written by some local apprentices - David Gidmark - Birchbark Canoe: Living Among the Algonquians.

Watching this video is amazing. The skill and knowledge required to build these splendid crafts is truly awesome!

Blockchain & eHealth: Towards Provable Privacy & Security in Data intensive Health Research

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS 
------------------ 

The First Workshop on "Blockchain & eHealth: Towards Provable Privacy & Security in Data intensive Health Research" will be held on: 

November 7, 2017, Markham (Greater Toronto area), Ontario 
https://www-01.ibm.com/ibm/cas/cascon/workshop.jsp 

The workshop is co-located with CASCON 2017: The Cognitive Era: Data, Systems and Society conference 
https://www-01.ibm.com/ibm/cas/cascon/ 

The registration for the conference and its workshops is free. 

The goal of this workshop is to bring together security, privacy and eHealth experts from academia, healthcare institutions, industry and public policy to focus on the challenges and opportunities of developing a blockchain enabled infrastructure that promotes trust between different stakeholders in health research and enables a provable privacy-aware path to real time access to patients data. 

We invite interested researchers to submit an abstract (limit of 500 words) reporting the state of their research relevant to the workshop objectives. Accepted abstract submissions will be invited to present in the workshop. Both research and application papers are solicited.  The submitted abstracts will be reviewed on the basis of technical quality, relevance, significance and clarity. We particularly encourage PhD students in the early stage of their research on blockchain and R&D managers who are planning the application of blockchain technology to submit an abstract to this workshop. 

Topics of this workshop include (but not limited to) the following: 

• Decentralized platforms for health information exchange 
• Public vs. private Blockchain for health research 
• Access control, anonymity and privacy issues among blockchain participants 
• Blockchain scalability issues and its solutions 
• Blockchain threat models, attacks, defenses and countermeasures 
• Network forensics in Blockchain 
• Blockchain trust verification models 
• Legal, ethical, and societal aspects of using blockchain in health research 
• Case studies (for adoption, attacks, etc.) 


WORKSHOP CHAIRS: 
- Reza Samavi, Department of Computing and Software, eHealth Program, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada 
- Thomas Doyle, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, eHealth Program, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada 
- Thodoros Topaloglou, Scarborough and Rouge Hospital, Toronto, Canada 

DEADLINES: 
- Oct. 23, 2017 Submission Deadline 
- Oct. 30, 2017 Acceptance Notification 
- Nov.   7, 2017 Presentation 

SUBMISSION: 
Please send your submissions, inquiries and correspondence on this workshop to (email to: samavir@mcmaster.ca) with the subject starting with "Workshop on Blockchain & eHealth:" 

Say Hello to Empathetic Interfaces and Digital Humans

- reposted with permission of author


The very first trend introduced in my co-authored book, ePatient 2015: 15 Surprising Trends Changing Healthcare, was "Empathetic Interfaces."

Trend Overview: Empathetic Interfaces

Source: ePatient 2015

My co-author Rohit Bhargava and I, described this as how "artificial intelligence ... [is making] health technology go beyond the diagnostic to be more empathetic and responsive to emotional needs—in other words ... more human."

The inventive people at New Zealand's Soul Machines are taking empathetic interfaces to the next level. They have developed a cadre of 'Digital Humans' that utilize AI to engage in face-to-face conversations, spontaneously display emotion and much more. One of Soul Machine's Digital Humans is pictured below.

Soul Machine's Digital Human

According to Soul Machine, the possibilities for these virtual assistants are endless. One day they could play a significant role in treating a range of mental illnesses, including depression.

Next week, I'll take those attending future::present, my upcoming breakfast event, on a tour of the rapidly evolving and exciting world of health-focused artificial intelligence (including Digital Humans).

I'll discuss recent innovations, leading companies, investment activity and more. And, I'll be joined by Thomas Tsang, CEO of Valera Health who will discuss how AI is being put into practice today.

A great group of executives from leading health organizations, consultancies, innovation catalysts, entrepreneurs and others will be attending future::present. I hope you can join us for this live event in New York City next week. Click the button below (or here) to register.

See you there.
Click Here to Register for future::present (September 19, NYC)

Fard
Founder/President, Enspektos, LLC

NIH’s All of Us Research Issues Initial Research Protocol

August 8, 2017

by Heather Landi

| Reprints

The National Institute of Health’s All of Us Research Program, previously called the Precision Medicine Initiative, released its initial research protocol, or research plan.
The All of Us Research Program’s 61-page protocol includes information on consent forms, the ethical issues associated with the project and explanations for how participants will be able to provide secure access to their electronic health records (EHRs).

The goal of the All of Us Research Program is to gather health-related information from one million or more diverse participants to detect association between genetic and environmental exposures and a wide variety of health outcomes.

The NIH states that longitudinal tracking of health outcomes through EHRs is an important component of the program. Through a consenting process, participants will be asked to authorize linkage of their EHR information. EHR data may be sent directly by the participant’s health care providers to the DRC or sent by the participant to the program through Sync for Science.

Access to EHR data will be repeated regularly throughout the life of the program. The initial data types to be included are demographics, visits, diagnoses, procedures, medications, laboratory tests, and vital signs, but may be expanded to all parts of the EHR, including health care provider notes. The feed may include mental health data, HIV status, substance abuse and alcohol data, and genomic information stored in the EHR

Participants may need to complete and sign a separate informed consent module to authorize access to their complete EHRs.

“We will create an informatics infrastructure to clean and standardize data from disparate EHR systems across the United States; this broadly applicable system will be a key contribution of the All of Us Research Program to health informatics research efforts nationwide. For participants enrolled by their health care provider organization, the site will extract data from the participant’s EHR, format it according to the DRC’s data model (based on the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership [OMOP] Common Data Model version 5, and transfer it to the DRC using secure protocols,” NIH stated in a press release.
And, the NIH states that although obtaining EHR data from direct volunteers presents unique challenges, early pilot studies have demonstrated feasibility of such an approach. “For example, the Sync for Science (S4S) project launched by NIH and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is creating a technology that aims to make it easy and safe for people to securely share their EHR data for research. S4S has been adopted by the All of Us Research Program and initially will be enabled in a small pilot for DV participants at S4S-enabled direct volunteer sites,” the NIH states.

All of Us Research Program direct volunteer participants who have enrolled at one of these pilot sites will be able to sign into their healthcare provider’s patient portal using the S4S workflow and authorize sharing their EHR data with the program. Their health care provider’s system will provide a secure application program interface (API), which is used by the research program, rather than the provider sending out data, and transmitted to the Us of All Research program.

And, NIH notes that this is just the first version of its protocol. In future versions, NIH intends to include plans to pilot test wearable devices for real-time data collection.

Get the latest information on EHR and attend other valuable sessions at this two-day Summit providing healthcare leaders with educational content, insightful debate and dialogue on the future of healthcare and technology.

Learn More

Boost Your eHealth Knowledge. Advance Your Career. Early Bird Deadline for HI Bootcamp Booster Shot Course in 2 Weeks.

It is eHealth Design & Architecture Week! "Too many men slip out of the habit of studious reading, and yet that is essential" — William Osler Stay in the habit. Continue your learning With NIHI HI Bootcamp Booster Shot Early Bird Deadline Only 2 Weeks Away   HI Bootcamp Booster Shot September 19 & 26; October 3, 10, & 17, 2017 | 12:00-3:00 PM ET 15 - 20  CPE Hours Canada’s iconic HI Bootcamp is back! Be the first to take the new HI Bootcamp Booster Shot. Learn from the best…Professor Dominic Covvey, one of Canada’s top HI experts, and Dr. Tom Rosenal, one of Canada’s foremost authorities in clinical Informatics. Learn the new essential competencies and capabilities for today’s informatics professionals: - Analytics and Big Data.  - The Internet of Things (IoT). - Artificial intelligence. - The Cloud.  - Precision/Personalized Medicine.  - Consumer Informatics. - Devices, Sensors, Sensor Networks and data produced. - Personal Attitudes and implications in our workforce.  - Biomedical Engineering and Health Informatics. - Complexity in health care and quantization of Health Informatics - And many others.  Registration & More Information Featured eHealth Design & Architecture Education Sessions Best Practices in HIT Implementation Although health technology implementations have come a long way in the last decade, the risk of partial success and having a 'zombie' project is still high. Given the extensive investments made in health technologies and the high hopes for their effectiveness for health provider productivity and patient safety, best practices in health technology implementation are still topical. Learn about best practices in HIT implementation from a systematic review of the literature with high quality statistical analysis of the findings. The published paper has received over 4000 reads on ResearchGate, a social media site for researchers. Come learn what everyone is so excited about. Canada's Chronic Disease Surveillance Network: Architecture & Next Steps Canada's chronic disease surveillance network (www.cpcssn.ca) recently reached 1000 physicians and 1 million de-identified patients in its database. CPCSSN is revolutionizing primary care by making research easier and faster and by making it easier to apply quality improvement to patient populations. How did we get here? What makes CPCSSN sustainable? What are the impacts of primary care research? Where do we need to go next? Creating the Next Generation mHealth App: A reference Architecture mHealth apps in smartphone app stores are languishing; downloaded and abandoned because they don't solve people's problems. What is the ideal design for an mhealth app? What's working? What's not working? Why? This presentation addresses these questions and proposes a new paradigm for patient mhealth apps that could potentially solve the log-jam. Learning from Amazon: Building the Next Generation EMR Form What if electronic medical record (EMR) systems were designed like the World Wide Web? What if we could improve user experience rapidly because we could see how users were using the software? What if we could make actionable information available at the point of care instantly using Big Data techniques? What if we could quickly test whether new ideas will work and make them available into all EMRs immediately? Lowering Costs in Health Care: Architecting Health Care for Diabetes Prevention What if we could predict who would get diabetes, long before they actually got it? What if we could provide high risk patients with training, support and counselling to prevent diabetes? What if we provided diabetes prevention services to elderly patients who already have other diseases? What Diabetes Prevention Apps Should Have and Why mHealth apps are not being used. Over 45,000 mhealth apps are languishing in mobile app stores. We evaluated over 200 diabetes mobile apps found in the Apple and Google app stores against a Reference Architecture for high quality mobile apps. Surprisingly, we identified a niche where apps do work well and are popular with patients in this space. However, the vast majority of patients with diabetes are not served by these niche apps. Email Philip Grove at pgrove@nihi.ca for assistance

National Institutes of Health Informatics
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Contact Us: info@nihi.ca