Aug 17, 2010

Wall Street Journal Features Master's Project on Observations of Daily Living

From The Wall Street Journal Health Blog

Tracking ‘Observations of Daily Living’ in Infants and the Elderly

By Laura Landro

To help improve care for chronic diseases and other health conditions, researchers participating in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Project HealthDesign are asking patients to use smartphones and other devices to collect data about their health — known as observations of daily living, or ODLs — between doctor visits, today’s Informed Patient column reports.

For patients on the far ends of the age spectrum, however, the job is a little more complicated: Babies can’t record their diaper changes and weight gain onto an iPod Touch, and many elderly patients with arthritis or cognitive decline aren’t good candidates for mobile devices. So some grantees are coming up with novel solutions to store and monitor those folks’ data....

At UC Berkeley, some former informatics [School of Information] grad students came up with an infant app of their own, called KidOoDL, for Kid Observations of Daily Living. Two of the developers, Abrahm Coffman and Nat Wharton [both MIMS 2010], who are technical consultants for a Project HealthDesign grant focused on Crohn’s disease patients, are now hoping to turn KidOoDL into a business. Their work was partly inspired by James Tucker [MIMS 2010], who worked with them on the project and is now an IT professional at Boeing. When his baby was born five weeks early, Tucker says he was daily writing down pages and pages of information his doctor asked him to track and thought “this would be so much easier if we could collect all this data in one place and see a graph that showed us patterns in a more meaningful way.”

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Last updated:

October 4, 2016