January is all about abstinence. Whether you're cutting down on drinking, meals out or nights in front of the TV, it's a time to readjust after weeks of excess. So when I told friends I'd committed to spending the last week of the month gorging on restaurant food, they were a bit confused.
We're so familiar with the wellness tech for the well - trackers and monitors for every measurable body signal. It's time for the similar tidal wave for the chronically ill. It's looking very hopeful. There are four things I'm most excited about making a big difference to everyday life:
Technology can get a bad rap. Some people claim it ruins our posture as we hunch over our computer screen; it disrupts our sleep if we look at the blue hues of laptops for too long and apparently robots are going to take over the world.
This model is designed to enable PAs to assess themselves against an accepted structure and importantly, on the back of this, to establish the technology infrastructure requirement and via phased investments help them deploy it quickly and cost-effectively to achieve a full IoT capability on a shared platform.
Technology can help along each of these dimensions. Thanks to mobile connectivity, reach is rapidly becoming a non-issue. But the real difficulty - and an area with significant potential for innovation and creative approaches - is in offering suitable products and services. Some of this is already happening.
Behind each of these scandals is a dangerous lack of knowledge about the factories producing these consumer goods, and more importantly little communication with the factory workers on a micro level.
A few weeks ago, a young woman appeared on the BBC's Big Questions - but this woman wasn't there to discuss religion or moral issues but the positive effect that her Change.org petition had on her life and millions of other women. Her name is Laura Coryton and she led the campaign to end the tampon tax - anyone who watched George Osborne's budget last year will have seen her success.
The opportunity for AI in Healthcare isn't just about making doctors and healthcare providers more efficient in their work; it's about making the lives of the patients better and saving lives is the ultimate business model you can have.
Oluwasoga, along with co-founders Genevieve Barnard, Joe McCord, and Opeyemi Ologun, launched MDaaS (Medical Devices as a Service) in early 2015. MDaaS provides a unique combination of high-quality refurbished medical equipment, diverse acquisition options, and maintenance and repair services to hospitals in Nigeria.
In fact, some of the themes to be explored this year will include the increasing use of gamification as a means to teach, as well as the incorporation of virtual reality into the classroom to further learning aims.
The real value of digital health goes beyond technology and embraces the user engagement processes, without which even the most brilliant solution would not deliver its promises. It's important to develop workflows that ensure a seamless integration of such solutions into patients and practitioners' daily routines, while fitting in the healthcare ecosystem as a whole.
As our interest grows with bionic technology, leading experts within the field predict a more diverse and intrusive prosthetic offering in the future. Not content with a versatile and functional limb, users will begin to expect and demand more; including sense of touch and predictive movement.
At first glance, Florence appears to be like any other young, carefree toddler. Full of glee, light and mischief. But the toy-like device that she is seated in is not, in fact, a toy. It is a Wizzybug powered wheelchair. Florence was born with a disability which means she cannot walk.
Our challenge was how to visualise a system where access is not readily granted to press or filmmakers, and how to bring the words of our contributors to life when most did not want to be filmed or identified. In many ways VR with its qualities of immersion, presence, and interactivity felt like the perfect medium for this subject matter.
Today we have taken a big step towards solving this dilemma. The final full results of a ground breaking research study - PROMIS - have been published in the Lancet. The findings show that giving a man a multi-parametric MRI (mpMRI) scan before a biopsy can radically improve the accuracy of the diagnostic process for prostate cancer.
Renewable energy is reaching a similar moment - its 'iPhone moment'. Technology advances and accumulated expertise in construction and deployment of wind and solar energy have come together in a way that has created a true tipping point in the energy industry.