New consumer technology is empowering us to take control of our day-to-day health. Leading tech writer Richard MacManus looks at what is out there now and what is in development, and what this might mean for our health in the future. Health Trackers tells the story of the rise of self-tracking — the practice of measuring and monitoring one’s health, activities or diet. Thanks to new technologies, such as smartphone apps and personal genomics, self-tracking is revolutionizing the health and wellness industries. Through interviews with tech developers, early adopters and medical practitioners, Richard MacManus explores what is being tracked, what tools and techniques are being used, the best practices of early adopters, and how self-tracking is changing healthcare. The first eight chapters focus on a particular type of, or approach to, self-tracking, for example, diet, daily activity and genetics. The final two chapters look at how the medical establishment is adopting, and adapting to, self-tracking. This timely book covers technologies still early in their evolution but poised to go mainstream, and rather than look at how to use specific gadgets, it focuses on the philosophy and usefulness of self- tracking in its many forms. Many of us are curious about it, but don’t understand the benefits (and sometimes risks) of these tools and practices. With no comparable book on the market, Trackers is the first to focus on consumer technologies and to help ordinary people negotiate the new health landscape.

Digital Health: Exploring Use and Integration of Wearables is the first book to show how and why engineering theory is used to solve real-world clinical applications, considering the knowledge and lessons gathered during many international projects. This book provides a pragmatic A to Z guide on the design, deployment and use of wearable technologies for laboratory and remote patient assessment, aligning the shared interests of diverse professions to meet with a common goal of translating engineering theory to modern clinical practice. It offers multidisciplinary experiences to guide engineers where no clinically advice and expertise may be available. Entering the domain of wearables in healthcare is notoriously difficult as projects and ideas often fail to deliver due to the lack of clinical understanding, i.e., what do healthcare professionals and patients really need? This book provides engineers and computer scientists with the clinical guidance to ensure their novel work successfully translates to inform real-world clinical diagnosis, treatment and management. - Presents the first guide for wearable technologies in a multidisciplinary and translational manner - Helps engineers design real-world applications to help them better understand theory and drive pragmatic clinical solutions - Combines the expertise of engineers and clinicians in one go-to guide, accessible to all

This book critically examines contemporary health and wellness culture through the lens of personalization, genetification and functional foods. These developments have had a significant impact on the intersecting categories of gender, race, and class in light of the increasing adoption of digital health and surveillance technologies like MyFitnessPal, Lifesum, HealthyifyMe, and Fooducate. These three vectors of identity, when analysed in relation to food, diet, health, and technology, reveal significant new ways in which inequality, hierarchy, and injustice become manifest. In the book, Tina Sikka argues that the corporate-led trends associated with health apps, genetic testing, superfoods, and functional foods have produced a kind of dietary-genomic-functional food industrial complex. She makes the positive case for a prosocial, food secure, and biodiverse health and food culture that is rooted in community action, supported by strong public provisioning of health care, and grounded in principles of food justice and sovereignty.

What happens when people turn their everyday experience into data: an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of self-tracking. People keep track. In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin kept charts of time spent and virtues lived up to. Today, people use technology to self-track: hours slept, steps taken, calories consumed, medications administered. Ninety million wearable sensors were shipped in 2014 to help us gather data about our lives. This book examines how people record, analyze, and reflect on this data, looking at the tools they use and the communities they become part of. Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus describe what happens when people turn their everyday experience—in particular, health and wellness-related experience—into data, and offer an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of using these technologies. They consider self-tracking as a social and cultural phenomenon, describing not only the use of data as a kind of mirror of the self but also how this enables people to connect to, and learn from, others. Neff and Nafus consider what's at stake: who wants our data and why; the practices of serious self-tracking enthusiasts; the design of commercial self-tracking technology; and how self-tracking can fill gaps in the healthcare system. Today, no one can lead an entirely untracked life. Neff and Nafus show us how to use data in a way that empowers and educates.

Physical Activity in Public Health Practice provides the first evidence-based, practical textbook to guide readers through the process of conceptualizing, justifying, implementing, and evaluating physical activity interventions across a broad array of settings and populations. Section One begins with an overview of epidemiology, measurement, critical milestones, and the importance of moving beyond individual-level physical activity intervention, to interventions aimed at policy-, systems-, and environmental-level changes. Section Two considers planning interventions across a variety of settings and populations, including general concepts for implementation and evaluation, how to build effective coalitions, steps for developing community-, regional- or state-level strategic plans, and effectively translating policy into practice. Section Three addresses how to implement physical activity strategies across a variety of settings, including worksites, faith-based settings, healthcare settings, schools, and parks and recreation. This section also provides guidance on the complexities and challenges of targeting interventions for specific populations, such as families, older adults, persons with disabilities, as well as different strategies for urban and rural populations. Lastly, Section Four outlines effective strategies for how to evaluate interventions depending upon impact, outcome, and cost evaluation, and dissemination models for your intervention. Presented from both a research and a practice perspective while discussing the best available research, this book provides the basis for planning and implementing physical activity programs that work and can build healthier communities. This hands-on text incorporates learning objectives, real-world examples, case studies, and bulleted lists whenever possible so that the content can be digested easily not only in undergraduate and graduate course settings but also by public health workers and other health educators in practice. Written by world experts and augmented by practical applications, this textbook prepares public health students and practitioners to develop effective interventions and spur greater physical activity in their communities. Key Features: Provides effective strategies for properly measuring and increasing physical activity in communities Demonstrates how to carry out physical activity interventions across a variety of settings, including schools, communities, worksites and many more Discusses methods for directing physical activity interventions to specific populations Delivers strategies for building successful partnerships and coalitions Practical group activities, exercises, discussion questions, audio podcast discussions, and a full instructor packet accompany the textbook

This book uncovers stakes and possibilities offered by Computational Intelligence and Predictive Analytics to Medical Science. The main focus is on data technologies,classification, analysis and mining, information retrieval, and in the algorithms needed to elaborate the informations. A section with use cases and applications follows the two main parts of the book, respectively dedicated to the foundations and techniques of the discipline.

As healthcare organisations and governments look to information technology to capitalise and enhance healthcare, the need for effective investment to update existing technology and provide cost-effective infrastructure for the future becomes clear. The issues of defining success and understanding opportunities are crucial to planning optimum investment and the best use of scarce resources. This book presents papers from the Australian Health Informatics Conference (HIC 2014), held in Melbourne, Australia, in August 2014. With the theme of investing in e-health: people, knowledge and technology for a healthy future, the papers delivered at the conference and included here address the issues of building a future-focused, scalable and adaptable infrastructure and of training the healthcare workforce necessary to support it. Subjects covered include: user participation in ICT development for older adults; interactive patient websites; application areas of multi-user virtual environments in the healthcare context; as well as governance, training and assessing the quality of data in public health information systems. The book will be of interest to all those policy makers and practitioners involved in the planning and implementation of information technology projects as part of the healthcare system.