Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Mobile Health Conference, Day 1
Wow! With the disclaimer that this may be a biased opinion, I have to say that the first day of our conference on "Reinventing Health Care in a Mobile World" was a great success. My colleagues, Rachel Maguire and Anthony Townsend, set the context for thinking about how mobility and technology are coming together to form the basis for the future of mobile health. Miriam Lueck and Jason Tester explained how we created and executed HealthRaising, our month-long immersive experience that used text messaging to promote health-related goals and raise our collective health score. They then welcomed Eric Holmen (Smart Reply) and Kara Chanasyk (Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab) to the stage for a discussion about how people respond to this type of mobile persuasion.
After a reception in what may be the most amazing room in all of San Francisco, we returned for dinner and a provocative keynote presentation from Gary Wolf on the concept of the Quantified Self. For the past year, Gary has been thinking and writing about why people collect biometric or other data about themselves; you can visit his blog on the subject here. I highly recommend his posts, "Why?" and "Alien Data." Gary (and his long-time colleague from Wired, Kevin Kelly) recently hosted the first ever Quantified Self Meet-up/Show & Tell; the next gathering will be held on October 23rd at the IFTF office in Palo Alto, CA. For more information, visit the Meet-up site here.
Tomorrow (okay, really in just a few hours from now), we'll continue to share with our clients and guests insights into behavior change, open mobile ecosystems, and lessons to be learned from the global south. I expect that this exchange of ideas will be as engaging and stimulating as Day One's was. And I am looking forward to whatever Miriam and Jason have in store for us as we continue to experiment with texting for health in real time.
As always, we welcome your feedback. If you've attended the conference, please share your thoughts by adding a comment to this post.