“Male wanderlust has been documented as early as the womb, where male fetuses move more than females do. At age 1, boys tend to crawl farther away from their mothers and stay away longer, and they are more interested in toys that move, like trains and cars. On playgrounds, boys tend to roam at the edges, while girls tend to stay put at the center. A study in the 1970’s found that boys playing after school spent more time outside and covered nearly three times as much ground as girls.”
—
All who wander are not lost. Quote source.
Female founders - the best thing you can do is veer off the beaten path.
Funders evaluating female founders - ask how often they got lost, or if they lead the pack on hikes. Do they walk a step ahead of male relatives?
If so, you’ve got a woman who likes to walk close to the edge. And this is *exactly the kind of woman you want on the founding team of a startup.
6:42 pm |
October 10 2011
“Soon my new machine arrived. Sleek, aluminum, solid. It had a look and feel that seemed to accurately reflect its hefty price tag. The UX of the software was awkward but rewarding. Just the kind of different I wanted.”
—
From @bryce’s post “The Computer That Changed My Life.”
Health startups take note of the language Bryce uses here:
Sleek. Solid. A look and feel of quality.
We should be building for the same reaction. We should be designing for high margin, high perceived value.
Low volume (to start) is ok - Macs had fanboys (and girls) for years before Apple went mainstream.
Good advice Bryce. Because a fresh start is just the kind of ‘different’ people looking for a health improvement program that *really* works want.
2:06 pm |
October 6 2011
“An effect was found in both cases; on average, participants bid 62% more when they built the box versus when they simply inspected it.”
—
If you let them build it, they will come…from “Why we love the things we build (and are willing to pay more for them),” via @garrytan.
How do we get people invested in their own health? We know we need:
1. Data about what they’re doing (and not doing)
2. Data about what’s working (and not working)
3. *Pivot* moment of self-realization when data makes ‘personal’ sense, and willingness to change results (or not, and they don’t want to change)
4. Beginning of data tracking post-origin, when decision was made to change
5. Data tracking across time/duration variables of goal
6. End of program/goal timing and success or ‘not yet succeeding’ post-action analysis
7. Revision of program/goal based on post-action analysis, or maybe, the user needs/wants to change something entirely different?
But it’s likely we’re overcomplicating things.
Maybe we don’t have to work so hard designing a complex system that allows users to inspect health data of value (as we define it).
Maybe we just have to let them build it, and select the inputs themselves.
In health, we’ve been deathly afraid to let the individual user have access to data, much less the opportunity to build something (a record, an app) that helps them make individual sense of it…
Our fears as businesspeople or healthcare providers or tech entrepreneurs might feel real (“how does building for the n=1 delta scale?”), but they’re cop-outs.
Data aggregation that works in PUBLIC health (“big data”) will be generated from data aggregation that works in PERSONAL health, and the tools to gather this data will ultimately be built for the individual user, BY THE INDIVIDUAL USER.
As blogging technology created the ability for anyone to become an author, curated health technology will create the ability for anyone to, eventually, heal what ails them.
Right now, the #quantifiedself movement is helping us curate activity via passive data aggregation from devices, like my current personal favorites, the Fitbit and Withings scale.
But the sector will move beyond #quantifiedself/#quantifiedhealth to something much more interesting and valuable (read: massive TAM).
Around Habit Labs, we’re nicknaming the early parts of this movement “curated health.”
At first, to help bridge the gap between hyper-geeky consumers who are core users of #quantifiedself technologies to the “middle 80” (ie my mom and sister), concierge-style assistance will be necessary as people learn to break free of constraints and feel personal benefits of becoming the builder of their own data aggregation and self-improvement tools and trackers.
Curated health will really be an evolution of ‘co’ curated health, where we allow consumers unprecedented access to the same tools formerly constrained within ‘expert’ communities of practice.
Allowing people to create their own #getupandmove challenges was a good start.
Empowering users with custom Health Month rules was another evolutionary step.
At Habit Labs we’re building the next gen environment.
This is a multi-device, multi-channel space (with mobile/online intersections) where users will have complete choice and control over mapping what behaviors they’d like to change.
Then we’ll direct them to the best fit programs (which they’re free to choose, modify, or reject), or allow them to create their own from scratch.
This means making a storefront as friendly as Ikea.
This means constructing a build-your own culture of savings where marginal value for the user increases in correlation with their commitment to the product they assemble from our pre-fabricated blocks.
This means making it simple and easy for them to do all of that, right out of the box.
Let people be the builder. Let them be the coach. Let them be the device that generates the most interesting data, and then give them the interface to begin to export it.
That’s how we get from a low-margin, high-volume culture in health technology to a high-margin, high-volume market.
http://neoacademic.com/2011/09/22/unfolding-the-ikea-effect-why-we-love-the-things-we-build/
4:15 pm |
September 30 2011
| 1 note
“
OMFG epigenetics + genoanth:
“Research at Nanjing University has found that strands of RNA from vegetables make it into our bloodstream after we eat them, and can regulate the expression of our genes once they’re inside us.
MicroRNAs, or miRNAs, are little strands of RNA that selectively bind to matching sequences of messenger RNA, resulting in repression of those genes.”
”
—
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-09/we-incorporate-genetic-information-food-we-eat-says-new-study
via @anselm
12:49 pm |
September 22 2011
“
A study published in the September issue of the journal Diabetes Care found that type 2 diabetes patients who were given behavioral coaching with the mobile phone-based WellDoc DiabetesManager system lowered their hemoglobin A1c readings significantly more than those who only received care during occasional doctor visits and through self-management.
But it was not all good news. The researchers observed no “convincing” changes in other measures of diabetes control, including blurred vision, pain, depression, and abnormal blood pressure and lipid counts. They hope future studies could focus more on these secondary measures of diabetes control, but for now, there remains plenty of fodder for skeptics in many areas of mobile health.
”
—
“Sometimes though, the hype overwhelms the message…”
http://mobihealthnews.com/13357/misinformation-exacerbates-mhealth-growing-pains/
7:51 am |
September 22 2011
