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Dr. Topol Delivers CES 2012 Digital Health Summit Talk
Jan 12, 2012
Wednesday’s opening panel discussion was chock-full of soundbites from Scripps Translational Science Institute Chief Academic Officer Topol, Life Technologies CEO Greg Lucier — who said technology is moving medicine into the “genetic age” — and UnitedHealth Group Chief of Medical Affairs Reed Tuckson, who described the obesity epidemic as “a tsunami of preventable disease washing over our population.”
The doctor-knows-best attitude is outdated and expensive, Topol added, as new consumer tools bring floods of new information and data to patients’ fingertips. Now what we need is a mass movement — like the one we’ve seen with the Occupy movement — to empower consumers to implement these tools and take charge of their health.
Dr. Topol demoed several devices demonstrating the power of digital medicine, including glucose monitors and a slick device from DNA Electronics that is a handheld DNA analyzer, capable of sequencing specific sequences of interest within seconds.
While Qualcomm clearly has its chips and loan dollars in a lot of interesting projects, the mobile chipmaker is stepping up its efforts to the next level with the “Tricorder X-Prize”. The X-Prize follows successful X-Prize competitions for space travel, fuel efficiency, and oil spill cleanup—competitions which produced solutions far superior to any existing ones.
The goal of the competition is to provide “self-diagnosis without the hospital.” The first team who can design a device capable of a broad self-diagnosis, while maintaining “fun” and “easy to use” design paradigms, will take home a check for $10M USD, courtesy of Qualcomm.
More information can be found at DailyTech
