The Diet Resolution: Start the New Year with a Healthy Eating Lift

I’ve never stuck to a diet – except when I tried going gluten free (it was difficult and I ended up eating a lot of gluten free pizza, cookies, and candy, defeating the purpose of a healthy alternative diet). Now with Lift to keep me on track, I look forward to tackling a month of diet change.

This year, Lift is launching a Quantified Diet Month where you can either pre-select a diet or use a diet Lift selects for you. For the month of January, Lift will encourage, teach, and help you through the diet via the Lift app. The app will measure and survey you regarding your weight loss, mood, energy, and adherence to learn more about dieting and what works for you.

Here is the list of ten diets you can choose from, below. To learn more, check out this post.

• Paleo: eat like a caveman, mostly veggies, meats, nuts. Advised by Paleohacks and Nerd Fitness

• Slow-Carb: lean meat, beans, and veggies; abstain from white foods like sugar, pasta, bread, cheese. Based on Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Body

• Vegetarian: vegetables, but no meat. Cheese and eggs are optional. Advised by No Meat Athlete

• Whole foods: eat only recognizable foods and avoid processed ones. Advised by Summer Tomato

• Gluten-free: no wheat, rye, barley or wheat-based foods

• No sweets: a simple diet change that affects your insulin swings

• DASH: USDA’s current recommendation

• Calorie counting: the old standard

• Sleep more: the science says this should work. Advised by: Swan Sleep Solutions

• Mindful eating: learn mindfulness to recognize when you’re full. Advised by ZenHabits and the Center for Mindful Eating

Glassomics: Newly Launched Medical Glassware Incubator

Glassomics is a newly launched medical glassware incubator, exploring and creating new ways to use glasses-like wearables in healthcare. With Google Glass growing in hype, it’s not surprising that Palomar Health and Qualcomm Life created Glassomics to innovate uses for glasswear and start discussions regarding security and liability concerns for such technologies.

Sparseware, a San Diego based software engineering firm, will be leading the development of the initial glasswear prototypes and will test the technology at the new $1B Palomar Health, deemed the “Hospital of the Future.”

Glassware abilities (for hospitals) that I find most interesting are:

• facial, voice, vital signs recognition
• image detection – cross checking prescriptions, allergy tags
• instant access to patient records/medical dictionary
• built-in camera during surgery/instructional videos
• easy note annotation
• decision support
• sending information/photos from one place to another (i.e. ambulance to surgery room)
• alerts, reminders, scheduling

I look forward to the first round of healthcare applications for glasswear and will be following this closely.

Fjord Kitchen Event: Making Wearable Technology Mainstream

Last night I attended Fjord’s When Will Wearables Go Mainstream? event at the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco.

Fjord is a premier digital service design consulting firm focused on the entire design workflow from smart management to concept development and branding. Creatively, the firm hosts Fjord Kitchen events where they pick an inspiring venue and introduce great food, people and topics together to establish entertaining and insightful discussions.

Hot topics throughout the night centered on the emergence of wearable trackers and how to balance simplicity vs. usability vs. actionability when creating a wearable device. For more insight from last night, check out Fjord’s Conversations blog.

Adam, Sarah, Bill, Sonny, Olof

Speakers:
Adam Gazzaley – Director, Neuroscience Imaging Center, UCSF
Sarah Rotman – Epps Senior Analyst, Forrester Research
Bill Geiser – CEO, MetaWatch
Sonny Vu – CEO, Misfit Wearables
Olof Schybergson – CEO, FJORD

DNA Data Storage: Replacing Your Hard Drive

DNA, nature’s data storage vehicle, has been successfully converted into storing personal files and photos – perhaps eventually replacing the hard drive. Of course any practical use is decades away – but scientists (Ewan Birney, Nick Goldman and collaborators) were able to store a complete set of Shakespeare’s sonnets, a PDF of the first paper to describe DNA’s structure, a mp3 clip from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, a text file of an algorithm and a JPEG of the European Bioinformatics Institute, where the research was conducted. As stated in their paper published in Nature, “Digital production, transmission and storage have revolutionized how we access and use information but have also made archiving an increasingly complex task that requires active, continuing maintenance of digital media. This challenge has focused some interest on DNA as an attractive target for information storage because of its capacity for high-density information encoding, longevity under easily achieved conditions and proven track record as an information bearer.”

The process is expensive and time consuming, but the research team found it very accurate and hardy. DNA, when properly treated, can stay intact for thousands of years. The data to be stored is first decompressed and translated into the four bases of DNA – A, G, T, C, using software that Goldman designed, and then those bases are synthesized into strands of DNA. When you want to look at your saved data, simply sequence the DNA strands and then plug the string of AGTC’s back into Goldman’s software, which will convert the data into its original file form.

For DNA data storage to really take off, the price of synthesizing and sequencing DNA needs to be cheaper and easier. Perhaps one day, it will become more of a reality.