TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. The service analyzes your last 1000 tweets and works best on users who have posted more than 1000 updates. It also works best on accounts that are operated by a single user and use Twitter in a conversational manner, rather than simply a content distribution platform.
it’s essentially a personality test, to learn your status on campus. Depending on their answers, the app will classify the users into one of five categories: Total Package, Art Freak, Loner, Party Animal, or Bookworm.
College Life Facebook application
Posted in social media, youth marketing
A computerized kiosk under development at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) can take a patient’s medical history, weight, pulse, blood pressure, and other vital signs, and even perform simple blood tests for glucose and cholesterol. Physicians hope that the device, slated to begin field testing in the United Kingdom in June, will one day bring relief to the overburdened healthcare system, and allow doctors to intervene earlier in chronic disease.
Doctors’ appointments in the United States often feel like more of an inconvenience than a help, both for patients, who can spend hours in waiting rooms, and doctors, who spend hours filling in charts and organizing patient information. Ronald Dixon, director of the Virtual Practice Project, imagines that his kiosk–a small, Windows-based desktop computer with just a few peripherals–could one day revolutionize doctors’ visits just as ATMs transformed banking. By removing the tellers from the interactions that could be easily automated, banks saved face-to-face contact for more complex transactions. Dixon, who’s also a primary-care physician at MGH, believes that the same could be done for doctors.
The kiosk consists of a tabletop computer and a number of peripherals–a blood-pressure cuff, a scale, a pulse oximeter to measure blood oxygen levels, and a peak-flow meter to determine whether someone’s airways are constricted–as well as a blood-testing device commonly used in emergency rooms that can measure cholesterol and glucose levels. (The current version requires a trained assistant to do the finger stick for blood collection, although future versions will be automated.)
Ideally, Dixon envisions his kiosks placed in supermarkets and big-box stores: customers could step up, key in their password-protected information, answer questions related to their personal health history, and then get their checkup. “The results would then go to your provider, and that provider sends a message back to you the way you want it–either through e-mail or texting–about what to do with that result,” he says. It could determine whether current medications are doing their job, whether a particular strategy is working or changes need to be made, and whether a more in-depth exam is necessary.
In June, the kiosk will get its first glimpse at prime time. A pilot version will be tested in stores and other public spaces in Britain as part of a newly established vascular screening program to prevent cardiovascular disease, stroke, and heart attack. The United Kingdom is an ideal testing ground because it has a nationalized health-care system: everyone has an assigned primary-care physician and electronic health records, so the infrastructure for sharing and responding to the results is already in place.
“They’re trying to catch people who typically don’t get screened, since a lot of the population doesn’t go to the doctor unless they’re sick,” Dixon says. “But everyone goes to the drugstore or grocery store once in a while.” A 10-minute interaction will include a blood-pressure check, combined with blood glucose and cholesterol screens. The information can then be sent off to a central database. Those residents at highest risk for disease will receive a phone call from their physician.
While some might worry that the kiosk will perform medical care best left in the hands of a doctor, Dixon notes that it’s not geared to diagnosis: the machine is designed to collect and relay test information in a much more streamlined fashion than that used today. And it is targeted, at least in part, to patients who might not otherwise visit a doctor’s office.
The ability to efficiently screen for and monitor chronic diseases, such as diabetes and hypertension, whose rates are predicted to rise over the next 10 to 20 years, will be especially important. “Treatment for these should be very streamlined to make sure that people are on the medicines they need to be,” says Kristian Olson, a pediatrician at MGH involved in global-health initiatives. “And all of that should be routinized as much as possible, or else you’re reinventing the wheel for each patient.”
Other physicians familiar with the project have created their own visions for how the kiosk might be used. “A trip to the doctor’s office is a fairly clunky process,” says David Howes, president, chief medical officer, and CEO of Martin’s Point Health Care, based in Maine and New Hampshire. “It takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of time, and it doesn’t really use the time of high-paid specialized professionals in the best possible way.”
Howes believes that just placing versions of Dixon’s kiosk in doctors’ offices could streamline the process and completely change primary care for both patients and their physicians. “Think about your process of going to the doctor: you go in, the nurse sits down with you, takes a lot of history, takes vitals, and might even order some lab studies. And then the physician comes in and replicates a lot of that work,” he says.
But a kiosk would allow for much of that to be accomplished before a patient ever sits down in an exam room. “By the time you get in to see the physician, the information has been gathered and organized,” Howes says. A clinician can look at the information and determine what conversations she and the patient need to have. “We’ve daydreamed that a tool like this, in the intake process, would be very useful.”
An automated system like the health kiosk could also be used to extend health-care access to the poorest nations. “It’s clear that there’s a human-resource limitation overseas that’s far larger than what we have in this country,” says MGH’s Olson. The kiosks, in combination with just a single physician or nurse practitioner, “could provide common care to a huge percentage of people,” he says.
In developing nations, Olson views the kiosk as less of a preventative screening tool than one that could be used for vital follow-ups. “I could see it being incredibly useful for routine follow-up for patients with issues such as tuberculosis or HIV,” he says. “It’s a way to follow up with physicians, demonstrate side effects, talk about whether [patients are] taking their meds.”
Posted in healthcare kiosk
They borrow leftover prescription drugs from friends, attempt to self-diagnose ailments online, stretch their diabetes and asthma medicines for as long as possible and set their own broken bones. When emergencies strike, they rarely can afford the bills that follow.
“My first reaction was to start laughing — I just kept saying, ‘No way, no way,’ ” Alanna Boyd, a 28-year-old receptionist, recalled of the $17,398 — including $13 for the use of a television — that she was charged after spending 46 hours in October at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan with diverticulitis, a digestive illness. “I could have gone to a major university for a year. Instead, I went to the hospital for two days.”
In the parlance of the health care industry, Ms. Boyd, whose case remains unresolved, is among the “young invincibles” — people in their 20s who shun insurance either because their age makes them feel invulnerable or because expensive policies are out of reach. Young adults are the nation’s largest group of uninsured — there were 13.2 million of them nationally in 2007, or 29 percent, according to the latest figures from the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit research group in New York.
Gov. David A. Paterson of New York has proposed allowing parents to claim these young adults as dependents for insurance purposes up to age 29, as more than two dozen other states have done in the past decade. Community Catalyst, a Boston-based health care consumer advocacy group, released a report this month urging states to ease eligibility requirements to allow adult children access to their parents’ coverage.
“There’s a big sense of urgency,” said Susan Sherry, the deputy director of Community Catalyst. She described uninsured young adults as especially vulnerable. “People are losing their jobs, and a lot of jobs don’t carry health insurance. They’re new to the work force, they’ve been covered under their parents or school plans, and then they drop off the cliff.”
If Governor Paterson’s proposal is approved, an estimated 80,000 of the 775,000 uninsured young adults across New York State would be covered under their parents’ insurance plans. That would leave hundreds of thousands to continue relying on a scattershot network of improvised and often haphazard health care remedies.
In dozens of interviews around the city, these so-called young invincibles described the challenge of living in a high-priced city on low-paying jobs, where staying healthy is one part scavenger hunt and one part balancing act, with high stakes and no safety net.
“For a lot of people, it’s a choice between being able to survive in New York and getting health insurance,” said Hogan Gorman, an actress who was hit by a car five years ago and chronicled her misadventures in “Hot Cripple,” a one-woman show that was a hit at last summer’s Fringe Festival. “There was no way that I could pay my rent, buy insurance and eat.”
Nicole Polec, a 28-year-old freelance photographer living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said she has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and has a client who procures Ritalin on her behalf from a sympathetic doctor who has seen Ms. Polec’s diagnosis. Ms. Polec’s roommate, Fara D’Aguiar, 26, treated her last flu with castoff amoxicillin — “probably expired,” she said — given to her by a friend.
When Robert Voris last had health insurance, in 2007, he stockpiled insulin pumps, which are inserted under the skin to constantly monitor blood-sugar levels and administer the drug accordingly. He said the tubing for the pump costs $900 a month, so lately he has instead been injecting insulin with a syringe. But Mr. Voris, 27, a journalism student at the City University of New York who works at a restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn, is constantly worried about diabetes-induced seizures like the one that sent him to the hospital last summer. (Because it happened at work, his boss covered the ambulance and other bills.)
“That’s definitely the concern: what happens if I have to pay for this?” he said. “And the answer, I guess, is credit cards. Hopefully it won’t happen until I find a job that actually gives me insurance, which probably won’t happen anytime in the near future, given the way the economy works.”
Most family insurance policies cut off dependents when they turn 19 or finish college, and many young adults start out in New York cobbling together part-time or freelance work with no benefits. To qualify for Medicaid, a single adult can earn no more than $706 a month — less than what a full-time minimum-wage earner makes. Yet the average insurance premium for a single adult is $900 a month, according to a spokesman for the State Insurance Department.
“At this point, I can’t really justify it monetarily,” said Ian McElroy, a musician who moved to Bushwick, Brooklyn, from Omaha, last year. “It’s not like I think I’m invincible, I’m 29, the world can’t touch me. It’s the very opposite of that. I’ve got to make rent and eat.”
With insurance out of reach, Mr. McElroy has taken to playing doctor, using online resources like WebMD, which offers medical news, descriptions of various diseases and drugs, and discussion groups. As he spoke, Mr. McElroy was icing his feet, which, one day in January, had become cripplingly painful; he was unable to walk.
“I think I have plantar fasciitis,” he said. “I’ve been laid out for two weeks.”
(Even if the Paterson proposal passes, Mr. McElroy, like Mr. Voris and Ms. Polec and her roommate, would not qualify because their parents live out of state.)
Internet diagnoses, self-medicating and trading prescriptions, of course, come with potentially dangerous side effects. Dr. Barbie Gatton, who has worked in emergency rooms throughout the city since 2002, said she often sees young people who have taken the wrong antibiotics borrowed from friends.
“We see people with urinary tract infections taking meds better suited for ear infections or pneumonia — the problem is, they haven’t really treated their illness, and they’re breeding resistance,” she explained. “Or they take pain medicine that masks the symptoms. And this allows the underlying problem to get worse and worse.”
There are clinics throughout the city that provide the young and uninsured free or cheap snippets of medical help, like the Community Healthcare Network mobile unit, which was parked in the East Village one snowy night. Lindsay Bellinger, 26, who does administrative work through a temp agency and lives in Astoria, Queens, said she relied on the mobile unit for pap smears and tests for sexually transmitted diseases.
“This takes care of gynecological work,” Ms. Bellinger said. “And I get a visit to the dentist from my parents as a Christmas gift.”
Levon Aaron, who has asthma and works as a bouncer at a West Village bar, has not had insurance since he was 19. Mr. Aaron, now 23, said that his asthma attacks had been less frequent since he began playing handball and working out, but they had not gone away. He tries to use his inhalers sparingly, but four times in the past year he has found himself out of medicine during a severe attack and landed in the emergency room.
In the hospital, he gets a prescription for a new inhaler, which costs about $30 to fill. But his outstanding bills total about $3,000, he said, an amount he cannot fathom paying.
Mr. Aaron was one of several young adults who said living without insurance meant trying to take better care of themselves.
“I’ve stopped eating fast food,” said Santiago Betancour, who is 19 and lives in Rosedale, Queens. “I’m eating rice, vegetables and fruits. And when I get sick, I exercise to sweat it off.”
Of course, there are those who do feel invincible, like Eric Williams, who is 24, unemployed and currently in the middle of a six-week snowboarding adventure in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Utah, British Columbia and California. Mr. Williams said by cellphone near Bozeman, Mont., that he looked into buying health insurance before he left, but abandoned the idea after being unable to find anything for less than $400 a month. Instead, he is just trying to be careful, though not always with success.
“I’ve hit a couple of trees,” Mr. Williams said. “But I’m trying not to.”
A new study by researchers at RTI International claims that the “Truth” national youth anti-smoking campaign prevented 450,000 youngsters from smoking from 2000 to 2004. During that time, the campaign spent $245 million on television advertising. That works out to $544 spent on each successful intervention. According to the American Legacy Foundation (which funds “Truth”), this saved society “between $1.9 and $5.4 billion in medical care costs.” Which is an impressively large estimated range, brought to you by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in a study that was partially funded by … the American Legacy Foundation. Personally, I thought the new “Truth” commercials (you know, with the singing Disney character rip-offs?) were better at warning kids about the effects of LSD than cigarettes. But maybe I’m wrong. There actually is a sunny side of “Truth.” Via Ypulse.
—Posted by Rebecca Cullers
Posted in behavior change
Sometimes, Google gives you these amazing pearls of insight into the world’s extreme state of mind:
Go into Google in Firefox and type “I am extremely” in the search box. You will get these most searched queries:
• 12,300,000 pages with people saying they are extremely tired
• 11,100,000 pages of extremely tired people
• 4,750,000 pages of extremely depressed
• 3,580,000 extremely shy
• 930,000 extremely pleased (only?)
• 839,000 extremely grateful
• 769,000 extremely happy (like me)
• 377,000 extremely jealous
• 321,000 extremely lonely
• 303,000 extremely terrified of chinese people (probably because they saw Jason Chen’s pants powers)
I can’t believe there’s no results for “I am extremely horny.” [Thanks Mona]
Posted in demographics
