This enterprise is 'for profit' but not 'just for profit'. I saw Jamie Heywood (Co Founder) speak at Medicine 2.0 Boston last year and was truly inspired by his vision of the future of participatory research. What matters in today's world is not how randomised and blinded the control trials were but how can research collect vast amounts of data from real people in their natural context with everyday challen ...

Every race and ethnicity has its own unique set of health concerns. Sure, we are all human and thus susceptible to the same rigors of the world around us, but some of us are more prone to getting specific illnesses or diseases. Something in our unique genetic makeup makes some groups and cultures more at-risk for certain ailments than others. Native Americans are not immune to this reality. Some common heal ...

Media consumption today has become personalized, through emergent technology, especially mobile technology and social media (which enables peer-to-peer sharing). Indigenous youth have more control over what their choices are in terms of what they want to view online. More and more access to media is neither 'only offline' or 'only online' as the shift to a seamless media consumption consumer becomes more wi ...

In April 2012, Mashable reported 66% of Americans are connected to at least one form of social media. Everything from emergency relief departments, such as the Red Cross and FEMA, to police agencies and news outlets are using social media to reach as many people as possible. Not everyone will agree social media is a great tool and a growing necessity. They may reason that social media has disconnected us fr ...

This is an example of data that we need here in Australia. I wonder if there is a PhD student out there already getting onto it. ...

This is the title of the article on Divas Chat in the Central Australian Land Rights News which was published in April 2012. Here are key issues from the article: social networking is causing social chaos in some Indigenous communities and is being used for 'sexting', cyber bullying and fanning bitter family feuds. The ability to be anonymous was one of the biggest problems of social networking. They are cr ...

Introduction Research on the intersection of digital technology and public health requires an ethnographic study looking at the communication styles and learning processes in a remote context. I hope that this presentation from Kral will be made available as a podcast.   ABSTRACT Digital technology is transforming the nature of communication and learning world-wide, and social media is catalysing perso ...

A simple table showing the number of health and well being social media profiles/accounts by state/territory. Departments of Child Protection, Consumer Disablity Services and Commissioner's offices were excluded. Some of the pages have more than 1000 likes or followers. However, only further qualitative analysis would answer the question of effectiveness and levels of authentic engagement. 1-3 pages had bro ...

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240"] mappa_blog (Photo credit: francescopozzi)[/caption] A search for active government blogs in Australia will lead you to an impressive list of 39 blogs listed on the Australia.gov.au site. Many government agencies are blogging, from the Aged Care Complaints Scheme News, to Share the Line. These are your trail blazers within the bureaucracy but only a small handfu ...

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Sydney University - Medical School (Photo credit: State Records NSW)"][/caption] Technology has made the lives of just about everyone easier. It’s made us more productive, faster at what we do, and more organized. Staying on top of everything as a med school student is, needless to say, difficult. Fortunately, there are a number of apps that will make y ...