Robert Chang, Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology at Stanford University Medical Center and SCPKU Faculty Fellow, gave a public talk at the center earlier this month focused on mobile healthcare innovation and the growing adoption of smartphones as medical devices.

Life expectancy worldwide made huge gains in the last century alone which has created an increasingly heavier burden on our health systems.  The world has seen a rise in age-related chronic illnesses, unique challenges for less developed nations, an increased need for specialized health care workers, and alarming health care cost increases.  These challenges have created opportunities which have spurred innovation in mobile healthcare solutions and the use of smartphones as medical devices to improve the delivery and cost of healthcare.

Chang highlighted Apple’s plans to penetrate the mobile healthcare market including rumors that the company will be releasing a new “iWatch” in October.  At its Worldwide Developer Conference in early June, the company also announced a new iOS 8-based health app and HealthKit framework for tracking personal health and fitness data.  Chang believes these represent important steps in digital health, signaling strong interest in major high-tech players to develop digital healthcare “hubs” and solutions for effective disease monitoring and management.

The current trend within the healthcare technology space is the general population’s use of smartphone sensors to self-track health and fitness data including heart rate, sleeping patterns, activity level and calorie consumption.  Over time, Chang sees the industry moving towards more wearable devices that are more fashionable, invisible and intuitive. 

Within the field of ophthalmology, eye disease diagnoses have typically been done with expensive, bulky equipment.  This limits the ability to deliver effective and efficient eye care in remote patient situations and/or where eye specialists aren’t readily available.  Ophthalmology is well-suited for telehealth and the use of mobile devices to facilitate remote triage. As mobile medical devices, smartphones are ideal given their broad market adoption and processing power and the ubiquity of the Internet.  Currently,  however, cost-effective adapters are needed to accompany a smartphone solution as the smartphone alone is insufficient to capture enough detail inside the eye for effective diagnoses.  As an ophthalmologist with a special interest in healthcare startups, Chang is working with a Stanford-based team to develop the EyeGo, a custom iPhone attachment and adapter coupled with a HIPAA-secure app to facilitate taking pictures of both the front and back of the eye to support remote triage and more efficient physician to physician communication.  While his initial platform is iPhone-based due to the phone’s ubiquity in the Silicon Valley, he eventually plans to port his solution to an open systems platform.

Chang closed his talk by re-emphasizing his point about wearable mobile healthcare becoming more invisible and intuitive.  “The lines are blurring between man and machine,” he said. He cited the “Turing Test,” an experiment developed by famed mathematician Alan Turing to create an artificial intelligence (AI) design standard for the tech industry.  “Can you design an AI where the AI can talk to a person but you can’t tell the difference between the computer and the human?” he challenged.  In order to pass the test, one must fool at least 33% of the judgment panel into thinking the AI is the real person.  Chang believes that mobile health technology can be successfully integrated into the medical field and that we will get to the point where people are completely comfortable interacting with the technology   “This is the next level in the wearable healthcare revolution  -- it will be like you’re talking to your doctor and you won’t be able to tell the difference,” he said.

Chang is a clinician-scientist with an active surgical practice and an interest in early stage medical device development and healthcare IT startups. He has received numerous grants and fellowships In recognition of his focus on patient care, physician innovation, biodesign, and design thinking.  Chang’s clinical research revolves around understanding the association between myopia and glaucoma.  

Recap: Pascal Lamy Lecture, “World Trade and Global Governance”

Save the Date: The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World

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Adam Tooze will deliver three lectures from his forthcoming book, A World Fit for Heroes. In particular, he will speak about the history of the transformation of the global power structure that followed from Imperial Germany’s decision to provoke America’s declaration of war in 1917. Tooze is the author of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) and Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (2001), among numerous other scholarly articles on modern European history.

Meet our Visiting Scholars:  Manfred Nowak 

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Manfred Nowak (LL.M., Columbia University, 1975) is Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professor; Visiting Professor, Stanford Law School; and, Professor of Law, University of Vienna. One of the world’s most renowned human rights scholars and legal theorists, Nowak has published more than 400 books and articles on international, constitutional, administrative, and human rights law, including the standard commentary on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. He was the Director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights at the University of Utrecht (1987-1989), and he founded the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights in 1989. From 1996-2003, Nowak was a judge at the Human Rights Chamber in Bosnia. He has also served as a U.N. legal expert on missing persons and enforced disappearances, and was appointed the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment in 2004. 

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Europe and the Global Economy

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Special Event:  Pascal Lamy Lecture

“World Trade and Global Governance”

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Date: February 10, 2014 

Meet our Visiting Scholars:  Bjørn Høyland 

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n Høyland (PhD, London School of Economics, 2005) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is currently visiting Professor and Anna Lindh Fellow at The Europe Center, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Global. The focus of his research is European Union politics and comparative legislative politics. Professor Høyland’s list of journal publications includes the American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, and European Union Politics. His textbook (with Simon Hix) The Political System of the European Union (3rd ed) is the standard text for advanced courses on the European Union.

Workshop Schedules  

Europe and the Global Economy

European Governance

Other Events