May 22, 2013

The Scanadu Scout^TM is almost in reach!  That is right, we are overjoyed to announce the launching of our Indiegogo campaign and your first opportunity at securing your own Scanadu Scout^TM.  Our team has been working tirelessly to create a device that you will truly want.

There are so many possibilities… but we cannot make the decision on our own.  This is why we need you.  Through our campaign, you will be able to let us know what features are most vital to you.  The Scanadu Scout^TM needs to be in your hands; where you are the researcher.

Will you scout yourself or others?  Will you scout at home, at work, on the go?  How will you use your Scanadu Scout^TM?

It is time for a community to create the perfect health device together.  Reserve your first-edition Scanadu Scout^TM and be a part of our exploratory community.

Test out the Scanadu Scout^TM before others.  Let us know what changes you would like to see.  Scan, record, learn, report, and make an impact on monitoring health today!

May 13, 2013

Because of widespread misdiagnosis, more than 150,000 patients per year may undergo considerable harm that could be easily prevented, according to a new analysis by researchers at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.¹

Why are there so many diagnostic errors? Trying to arrive at a diagnosis, at least in a doctor’s office, is often done in a very limited amount of time and based on incomplete information. Often the feedback loop to check the diagnosis is incomplete as well.

Emerging mobile technologies – especially in the hands of patients themselves – offer great promise to prevent medical errors and improve health by gathering better data, suggesting relevant possible diagnoses, and closing the health loop to build follow-up and feedback into the system.

While the jaw-dropping negative statistics in the analysis are troubling, they are more a measure of how much our health could be improved in the near-term with better diagnostics. Let the data help. Let patients help.

¹  Newman-Toker, DE, and Makary, M. “Measuring Diagnostic Errors in Primary Care” JAMA Intern Med. 2013;(online Feb. 25):1-2. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.225

May 6, 2013

Before we start in on our upcoming news and expectations, we would like to catch you up on all the excitement from last year.

The Scanadu team began 2012 with moving into our new offices at NASA Ames Research Park.  Sharing space with NASA has introduced us to some wonderful partners, companies, and astronauts, particularly Yvonne Cagle, M.D.  Yvonne is a retired flight surgeon whose passion for Scanadu is almost as great as ours.  Through Yvonne we have been testing our products at NASA and compiling a great deal of actionable data.

Speaking of devices, the Scanadu Scout ^tm made its debut in October 2012 at the Wired Health Conference.  Our CMO, Dr. Alan Greene, explained the need for a consumer-friendly tech device like the Scanadu Scout ^tm through his presentation on dismantling the long-held practice of using 98.6 as the average body temperature.  Dr. Greene demonstrated that temperature is a waveform and that everyone should learn their individualized temperature wave in order to catch early warning signs of fever and other temperature-related ailments.  The Scanadu Scout ^tm enables consumers to see the curves in their temperature, and even in other vitals.

Also in the news, Scanadu released the first hints of the Scanadu Scanaflo ^tm, a urine-analysis product that brings the lab into your bathroom.  Scanadu’s Scanaflo ^tm will provide information about internal changes in one's body.  The information gathered from Scanaflo ^tm will be processed in minutes and displayed for consumers instantly.  We are very excited to be incorporating the data acquired from both ScanaFlo ^tm and Scanadu Scout ^tm in order to offer consumers a more complete snapshot of their health.

2012 has been a very busy year for us: brainstorming, partnering, prototyping, analyzing, and turning ideas into functioning and accurate devices.  Things are looking bright, and 2013 is shaping up to be an even more exciting year; we'll keep you posted!

April 24, 2013

Dogs, horses, rabbits, and cows don’t see red. Indeed, most mammals see the world in two dimensions of color: the yellow-blue dimension and the grayscale, from light to dark.

I was taught in school that some of us primates have extra cones in the retina to allow us to also see the red-green dimension of color so that we could easily spot fruit from among all the green leaves in the forest. This made intuitive sense to me.

But neurobiologist Mark Changazi, a breakthrough thinker and author of The Vision Revolution, saw a major flaw with this reasoning: among primates, the list of those that see in three dimensions of color doesn’t match up with the list of those that eat fruit.

Oops.

Changazi proposed another theory: seeing red allows us to notice subtle social and health clues in others of our kind. If this were true, he suggests, the list of primates with this type of color vision should match up with the list of those with bare skin on the face or genitals. Turns out it does.

Further, you would expect our cones to be tuned to highlight the differences between arterial and venous blood (oxygenated and deoxygenated blood), rather than three color cones that are evenly spaced in the visible light spectrum. And, lo and behold, our L and M cones react most strongly to light at very similar wavelengths – that can easily pick up changes in oxygenation of our blood.

Last weekend, while on a whale watching boat in the Monterey Bay, I could tell at a glance which of my fellow passengers was feeling seasick by the color of their skin.

The world looks – and sounds and smells – different to different animals.

Here’s the exciting part: our bodies are constantly emitting valuable information about our health -- across the electromagnetic spectrum, for instance, outside the narrow spectrum in which we can see.

At Scanadu we are working on the next generation of senses to allow us to know our bodies as never before.