6 Recent Digital Health Innovations to Watch

At HIT Consultant, we are always thinking about how digital innovation is impacting healthcare. As a result, we’ve compiled a list of innovations that have the potential to create greater change when it comes to the application and practice of healthcare in our series: HIT Consultant’s Selected Six Digital Health Innovations. Take a look at what we’ve chosen for May’s selected six, including a genomic search engine with fishy inspiration, a smartwatch that turns your skin into a touchscreen, and a thermometer 20,000 times smaller than a single human hair.

Erica GarvinThe sequel to Disney’s “Finding Nemo” may not come out until June, but the genomic search engine partially named after the fishy tale is already here. GeNemo—the “Ge” part stands for the word gene— is a Google-like search engine for functional genomics data that was created by University of California San Diego bioengineers and led by Professor Sheng Zhong. It’s arguably the first genomic search engine of its kind, designed to solve a very pressing and complex pain point for researchers: effectively searching functional genomic data from online data repositories.

The new search system may lead researchers to uncover the functional aspects in specific parts of genomes that are associated with normal physiology or disease of specific organs and tissues. Unlike text-based search engines, GeNemo’s searches are based on pattern matching of functional genomic regions. Instead of just “searching by text,” the new tool allows researchers to search inside the functional data. Searching for binding patterns that are similar to that of a novel transcription factor, is just one example...