MIT Sets Sights On Open-Source mHealth During Innovation Event

The MIT Media Lab’s eleven-day Health and Wellness Hackathon is not your average gadget exhibition.  Bringing together eighty participants from around the world, the annual event, which was held in January, is designed to inspire new ways to fix an age old problem: how to use technology to prevent illnesses before they start.  Focusing on the use of standardized, interoperable, open-source platforms, the six teams spent nearly two weeks thinking up apps and home medical devices that would tear down proprietary software barriers and help patients take charge of their healthcare.

“The tradition in health care technology is, ‘this is our device, we make our own software,’” says Dr. John Moore, who organized the event. “The goal is to connect that bit of knowledge to the rest of your health experience.”  With myriad consumer devices and thousands upon thousands of mHealth apps each built on their own individual platforms, it isn’t enough to download a pedometer for an iPhone or clip on a blood pressure monitor. [...]