Blogs

Ethic Questions

May 11, 2022

Linkedin, Digital Health and Ethics

The development of self driving cars has shine a bright light on the tramway challenge, which has reached meme status.

The digital health revolution is no different and has created gazillions of ethical challenges. You can call that a goldmine of ethic questions, if you like your glass half-full or are a professional ethicist. Or you can call it a minefield, if you are an entrepreneur in health tech, or an investor backing such a venture. Ethics-wise, healthtech does not play in the same league as another regulated industry, miltech. The concepts of risk and benefits are used in both leagues, but with meanings that are not compatible. Health tech does not play either in the same league as “plain” tech (aka YC). The concepts of risk and benefits most of the time share now compatible definitions, i.e. use roughly the same axes to describe their space of operations. But still, the benchmarks and values measured alongside these axes differ widely.

Just guidelines

April 28, 2022

I posted this as a Linkedin article - after I started a post and was out of room. After several instances of being temporarily banned from linkedin, I decided to safekeep it here.

Nature is a continuous and multidimensional system. Any model based on a discrete classification will necessarily be a dimension-reducing projection, and will create arbitrary and energy-hungry distortions.

Justin Kunimune, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This article started as a comment to this post. I exceeded the character limit - so here’s my first ‘article’ here. The top comment on this post explains that “these guidelines are just that: guides. They are not rules or laws.” I disagree.

Creative history

April 25, 2022

This fascinating article explains very well how pareidolia combined with the fire lit environment of a paleolithic dwelling could have given birth to different forms of pictorial art. The hypothesis is highly relevant and the story is easily envisioned ; the aura of a campfire and its impact on our mental state is undeniable.

I’m curious about the statement that (at that time) “huge amounts of time and effort would have gone into finding food, water and shelter, it’s fascinating to think that people still found the time and capacity to create art”. A lot of paleoromantic think otherwise. I need to dig a bit more into that (starting with this one). The statement comes from the Neuroscience News article, I could not find a similar sentence the paper itself.

Pebble

April 12, 2022

Great article by Eric Migicovsky, founder of pebble.

Apple

April 10, 2022

Nitrile Gloves

Random Regulatory fact of the day:

Apple is the sponsor of four medical devices in Australia.

As expected, two are the two features of the Applewatch that are medical devices in Australia (registered in February and March 2021).
Two others are gloves and infrared thermometers that Apple registered as importer at the start of the pandemic in early 2020.

Technically, Apple started they #healthtech journey in Australia with thermometers and nitrile gloves.

TRIZ

April 6, 2022

Brilliant example of Innovation. Moving our energy grids away from fossil fuel comes with many challenges, among them the storage of energy at the yearly/seasonal scale. There are several existing solutions already developed, based on different principles. But pushing these solutions further is raising other, new challenges: using more rare materials creates further environmental damage and generate politico-economic incidents. Some tech may be dangerous at large scale, or too costly, or have a too large footprint.

2050 Crossroads

April 1, 2022

2050 Crossroads

A book by Hicham Naim

I believe anticipation is a fundamental part of innovation.

There are plenty of futurist magazine articles that promise us a life of luxury, comfort and performance thanks to all sorts of new technology developments based on bench prototypes and university lab press releases. Flying car

This is very common with generalist ’tech’ press, that will cover vehicles and transportation, space travel, housing, leisure etc. Healthtech and medtech are no stranger to this trend (I plead guilty. My linkedin feed is full of neurotech news). And that’s justifiable. It’s not possible not to feel emotional when seeing videos of deaf patients hearing for the first time their love ones (thx cochlear implants), or accident victims with a severed spinal cord who can feel/move their lower limbs. The list goes on, and this can only trigger a biased-but-understandable techno-optimism. Techno-optimism is not bad per se. It is on the opposite a necessary quality for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs cannot pull through the amount of work, research, pivots and trials it takes to put an innovation on the market without a deep belief in their technology.

Selftech Pioneers

March 24, 2022

Selftech Pioneers

https://events.humanitix.com/diy-loopers-pioneers-of-self-tech

Jasmine Schipp will introduce us to the communities of DIY Loopers and share with us her research on their reasons to choose to use DIY systems, how they navigate the challenges, and the future of this movement. After Jasmine’s presentation, Jon Schull, Anthony DiFranco, Renza Scibilia and I will discuss further the place and scope of this movement within the entire diabete-care ecosystem, and its relationships with other communities of DYI makers, open-source advocates and healthtech enthusiasts.

trials

in general, advisory, clinical, validation

March 19, 2022

This is particularly relevant for entrepreneurs. The landscape today is not anymore the one in which Elizabeth Holmes was able to pull a “Ana Delvey” on an impressive list of investors to grow her venture to a $10B valued unicorn.
Investors today are evidence-driven and data-driven. The promises have to be substanciated with a solid process BEFORE the later series of investment. Even at seed level, there are significant expectations in terms of clinical evidence. That makes the challenge more interesting to scientifically motivated entrepreneurs, but also much more demanding.