SAN FRANCISCO & ZURICH – May 20, 2019 – Ava Science Inc, a women’s health care company that focuses on innovative digital technologies, announced today unprecedented insights from a newly published clinical study with their Ava Fertility Tracker. The trial demonstrates that Ava detects significant, phase-based shifts in multiple physiological parameters throughout a woman’s menstrual cycle to pinpoint her fertile window. Ava’s wearable device is the only product available that collects data on changes in multiple signals across the menstrual cycle, analyses them with a novel, deep machine learning algorithm, and informs users daily if they are fertile. As presented in the peer-reviewed paper, WearableRead More →

Source: Marianne T.S. Holter Here’s a scenario that you might recognize: You’re running some qualitative user interviews as part of developing or implementing an eHealth program, and some interesting aspects about program use keeps coming up in the interviews. You have a hunch that this might be of interest to the field more in general, beyond your specific program, and wish you could explore it more thoroughly. However, although it seems to linger in the background in several interviews, not all your interviewees talk directly about it, and so you don’t really have enough data to publish anything separately on it. So, then what do youRead More →

Source: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center BOSTON – A new study of more than 20,000 adult patients, led by Jan Walker, RN, MBA, co-founder of OpenNotes, found that reading office visit notes offers considerable benefits for patients, particularly those from underserved populations. The study, “OpenNotes After 7 Years: Patient Experiences With Ongoing Access to Their Clinicians’ Outpatient Visit Notes” published today in the open access Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), is the first large-scale assessment to date of patients’ experiences with a broad range of clinicians working in practices where shared notes are well established. Among the survey respondents, 98 percent thought online access toRead More →

Commercial app stores urgently need to address the lack of information available to consumers about the benefits and quality of health apps, according to a new study funded by the NIHR Maudsley BRC. The study was published in the open access journal, Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR). The study highlights the lack of solid evidence for claims made about health apps, which may actually provide little benefit or even cause harm. It calls for closer regulation of the health app industry, which is estimated to be worth $25 billion globally, and whose business depends on rapid high sales. Led by Professor Dame Til Wykes, who leads the BRC’sRead More →

Source: Ursula Whiteside There is enormous and largely untapped potential to prevent suicide, and that’s because suicidal people visit their doctors. Nearly half of people who die by suicide visit their doctor in the month before their death. Routine screening for depression can uncover suicidal thoughts—but that’s only part of the story.  Doctors need suicide-specific resources for immediate, brief intervention. The NowMattersNow.org website is an open-access, video-based resource for individuals with suicidal thoughts. A study just released in the open-access journal, Journal of Medical Internet Research, found that suicidal people visiting NowMattersNow.org reported measurable reductions in intensity of suicidal thoughts and emotions. Researchers asked over 3000Read More →