Discover the Science of Health
Lack of sleep is a national epidemic for kids today. Sleep deprivation can affect cognitive skills, health, academic achievement, and relationships. For children, getting enough sleep helps with everything from schoolwork, to behavior, to friendships, to physical wellbeing. Sometimes the problem isn’t how much, but how well, a child is sleeping. That’s where the Sleep Champ app can help.
FastForward Health is an evening film festival highlighting those people innovating and developing new ideas to improve public and community health around the world.
Founded by Andre Blackman (@MindofAndre) and David Haddad (@haddadda), FastForward Health launched on November 1st, 2011. As we near the end of year one, we sat down with co-founder Andre Blackman to talk about the project and where it’s headed.
Andre Blackman is Founder and Managing Editor of Pulse + Signal, a website that features highlights and commentary on the impact/usefulness of technology in the public health landscape. He is the former Director of Digital for the American Heart Association, Mid-Atlantic Affiliate. Andre is also a member of the Advisory Board for the Mayo Clinic Center for Health Care Social Media (over the years, we’ve interviewed two other board members: Phil Baumann and Bertalan Mesko).
Traditional tech devices have been rigid and boxy. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup MC10 aims to change that. The company is developing flexible and stretchable electronics that preserve the performance of silicon while enabling new form factors that can be bent or stretched to conform to soft and irregular surfaces and can be used for a variety of medical applications.
Fooducate is an app for the iPhone and Android that allows consumers to get easy-to-understand information about the quality of a product by scanning the bar code with their smart phone. A first-place winner of the U.S. Surgeon General’s Healthy Apps Challenge, Fooducate was developed by dieticians and parents to help consumers see through some of the “tricks” product manufacturers use to conceal unhealthy ingredients, including artificial food colorings (which are controversial among nutritionists and scientists), high-fructose corn syrup, trans fats (which can legally “hide” in foods in small amounts), and various additives.
The BrainGate Company is a privately-held firm focused on the creation of technology that will allow severely disabled individuals, including those with traumatic spinal cord injury and loss of limbs, to communicate and control common everyday functions by thought alone.
The BrainGate neural interface system consists of a sensor to monitor brain signals together with computer software and hardware, which turns brain signals into digital commands for external devices. This is a type of brain-computer interface intended to put robotics and other assistive technology under the brain’s control. The size of a baby aspirin, the sensor contains 100 hair-thin electrodes that can record the activity of small groups of brain cells. It is implanted into the motor cortex, a part of the brain that directs movement.
