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Tag Archives: Smartphone Apps
Health: Scientists Develop Simple Smartphone App To Detect “Diabetes” With Up To 80% Accuracy (UCSF)
Overall, the algorithm correctly identified the presence of diabetes in up to 81 percent of patients in two separate datasets. When the algorithm was tested in an additional dataset of patients enrolled from in-person clinics, it correctly identified 82 percent of patients with diabetes.
In the Nature Medicine study, UCSF researchers obtained nearly 3 million PPG recordings from 53,870 patients in the Health eHeart Study who used the Azumio Instant Heart Rate app on the iPhone and reported having been diagnosed with diabetes by a health care provider. This data was used to both develop and validate a deep-learning algorithm to detect the presence of diabetes using smartphone-measured PPG signals.
Among the patients that the algorithm predicted did not have diabetes, 92 to 97 percent indeed did not have the disease across the validation datasets. When this PPG-derived prediction was combined with other easily obtainable patient information, such as age, gender, body mass index and race/ethnicity, predictive performance improved further.
Health: “Amazon Care” Virtual Medical Service Smartphone App Launches
From a Becker’s Hospital Review release (02/19/2020):
Amazon’s virtual medical clinic that offers in-person follow-ups is now available to Amazon employees in Seattle.
Five things to know:
1. The virtual medical service, called Amazon Care, went live via the company’s employee benefits portal on Feb. 18. It is available to Amazon employees who work at the company’s headquarters and their dependents.
2. Amazon Care offers employees virtual medical consultations with physicians and nurse practitioners. Patients can use the app to schedule a follow-up visit in their home or office.
3. Medications prescribed via Amazon Care can be delivered to a patient’s home.
4. “Amazon Care eliminates travel and wait time, connecting employees and their family members to a physician or nurse practitioner through live chat or video, with the option for in-person follow up services from a registered nurse ranging from immunizations to instant strep throat detection,” an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC.
5. Amazon first shared information about Amazon Care in September, noting that it planned to pilot the service in Seattle.
Digital Medicine: Apps For Smartphones, Machine Learning To Treat Kidney Disease (The Lancet)
From a The Lancet online article (January 18, 2020):
Smartphone app-based platforms for urine testing could improve adherence to albumin creatinine ratio (ACR) testing. One study showed screening of at-risk patients almost doubled with a home urine test kit that uses a smartphone camera to easily and accurately quantify ACR from a user-performed urine dipstick. If independently validated in a large, diverse population, this low-cost strategy could change the often dim trajectory for individuals with declining kidney function. 
In the outpatient setting, a Japanese team used machine learning and natural language processing to predict disease progression and need for dialysis over 6 months in patients with diabetic nephropathy. And while the increased risk of contrast-induced acute kidney injury has been long appreciated, a machine learning algorithm trained and tested on 3 million adults effectively quantified the degree of kidney injury on the basis of the volume of contrast used and individual patient-level characteristics.
Boomers Daily 