Conference Details - Agenda

Like virtually every other aspect of our collective future, wellness will be driven, dispersed and defined by Internet technology. As with publishing and politics, the Internet will shift wellness information and empowerment from the few to the many, from hierarchy to concentricity, from doctors and healthcare providers to patients and families. New forms of online communication and collaboration will give people worldwide the ability to research, choose, evaluate and communicate their prescriptions for wellness (and illness – the two will converge). So far, so good. But information minus analysis and empowerment absent wisdom is no one's definition of wellness. The opportunity is in the Web, but the challenge is in our hands: how to support and guide the healthcare power shift from practitioner to patient so that wisdom is the ultimate outcome.

We review the most popular posts on our blog, WBUR's CommonHealth -- on topics ranging from exercise and painful sex to rare childhood diseases and how to say 'no' to your doctor -- and explore what the metrics suggest about the information people seek when it comes to their health care.

I will review the past, present and future of health care reform. In particular I will review the development of heatlh care reform in Massachusetts, and how that became the basis for the ACA. I will also talk about how the ACA extends beyond the Massachusetts reform and the challenges facing reform going forward.

Participating Start Up Companies

1DocWay
AblaCor Medical Corporation
AdhereTech
Allazo Health
Beyond Lucid Technologies, Inc.
Comfort Care Clothing Co.
Empower Interactive, Inc.
GeriJoy
Keas
Lark Technologies, Inc.
Myne Health, Inc.
Ringadoc.com

Using newly developed computational models of human social behavior, we are able to passive monitor people's quality of life and mental state, and then using this information to feed back social incentives that support healthier behavior. This is finding real traction in dozens of health and community support programs across the US and elsewhere.

An aging population presents society with both challenges and opportunities. I discuss some of the demographic shifts happening in the US and what wellness may mean for an aging population. I review some of the work done at the MIT AgeLab to highlight how our research and ideas about the future of technologies and services may help people, who are already living longer, live better.

Emotion is much more vital to health than we ever thought - influencing pretty much every organ in our body, not just "how we feel." We built a camera to read heart rate, and a wearable sensor to measure a key dimension of emotion and encountered some huge surprises during long-term measurement - from seizure detection to mysterious "storms" in sleep, and other insights that are now poised to help provide important indicators in clinical trials and treatments. This talk will highlight new technologies and insights that have come out of our lab including Q sensor, CardioCam, and MoodMeter.

Relational agents are computer animated characters that simulate face-to-face conversation between health providers and clients, including both verbal and nonverbal channels of communication. The agents can be designed to emulate best practices in human face-to-face health counseling to provide a clear channel of communication for individuals with a wide range of reading, health and computer literacy. The social and relational behaviors used by these agents (such as empathy) serve to increase patient trust in and therapeutic alliance with the agents, leading to increased engagement and use over time. In this talk I’ll describe the dialogue systems and animation technology used to implement these agents. I will also discuss my experiences over the last decade building relational agents for health education and longitudinal health behavior change interventions in which users have had thousands of counseling sessions with them at home, on mobile devices, in the hospital, and in outpatient clinics.