Is your future health in your hands?
SMARTPHONES ARE FAST BECOMING THE FRONT-LINE IN THE BATTLE AGAINST DISEASE, BUT CONCERNS ARE GROWING FOR HOW WE’RE USING THEM. TECHLIFE INVESTIGATES THE FUTURE OF MOBILE HEALTH.
EVERY NIGHT, MILLIONS of us connect our phones back up to mains power, recharging batteries exhausted through a day of videos, social media, games and the occasional phone call or two. But increasingly, smartphones are being seen in research circles as the great untapped source of latent computing power. There are concerns over rates of smartphone addiction, but from a research perspective, the cure for a range of conditions and diseases from HIV to Alzheimer’s could literally be in your hands.
YOUR SMARTPHONE IS A COMPUTER
We’ve been saying it for years — smartphones are powerful computers capable of doing far more than we often give them credit for. But their portable nature makes them ripe for adoption in a range of personal-health initiatives and research that help us both collectively and individually. Smartphones are increasingly being seen as a broad-based solution for everything from data gathering to diagnostic tool to collaboratively calculating massive mathematical problems that may unlock the answers to cancer and other diseases.
DREAMLAB
One of the latest examples of this idea of ‘distributed data mining’ comes from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the Vodafone Foundation. DreamLab is an iOS and Android app that works while you sleep. As you charge your phone overnight, the app taps into the Garvan Institute’s cloud servers to retrieve data for processing, calculating patient DNA profiles to better understand cancer. All data is anonymised before it’s downloaded to your device, but with some 26 million calculations to perform and each one taking around 5–10 minutes to execute on a mid-range smartphone, it’s the sort of task where the more computing devices you can throw at it, the better. As soon as you pull the phone off charge, the app goes into ‘suspend’ mode, preserving your phone’s battery life for the day ahead. Currently, DreamLab has two projects — Project Decode and Project Genetic Profile. Project Decode looks at solving breast, ovarian, prostate and pancreatic cancers, while Project Genetic Profile aims to find the answers to brain, lung, melanoma and sarcoma (soft-tissue) cancers.
It’s not the first time smartphones have been drafted into the distributed fight against disease. The University of California, Berkeley, created the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) app for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux back in 2002, with a simplified version released for Android devices in 2008. Today, BOINC is available on Google Play for distributed projects including Rosetta@Home, which studies a range of diseases such as HIV, cancer and Alzheimer’s.
Even older is Folding@Home, launched by Stanford University back in 2000. Originally for
the PC, it’s now available on Android, powered by Japanese tech giant Sony and recently made open source.
However, the difference with DreamLab is that the Garvan Institute has teamed up with Vodafone Foundation — that means Vodafone Australia users who download and run the DreamLab app and use their mobile connection to transfer DreamLab data will do so data-free. Thinking about ways to boost processing speed, we wondered whether you could also run the DreamLab app using Android-x86, an open-source version of Google’s Android operating system for Intel-processor based systems. We first tried installing Androidx86/6.0-r3 (Marshmallow) as a virtual machine inside Oracle’s VirtualBox virtualisation app. While Android-x86 works and DreamLab installs, the DreamLab app is designed to keep tabs of your device’s CPU temperature and won’t run if the temp is too high or can’t be detected. And with no CPU temp data relayed to Android-x86 through VirtualBox, DreamLab gets no data and won’t run. However, we did find an alternative. It will run on Android-x86, when Android-x86 itself is installed on actual hardware. You can find out more and download the Marshmallow/6.0-r3 version from the Android-x86 website ( android-x86.org). It’s best installed on a spare system with a spare empty hard drive or solidstate drive that you can devote fully to Android. How to install Android-x86 is beyond the scope of this story (we cover this occasionally in our sister publication, APC), but we had DreamLab running successfully on an old Intel-powered dual-core Compaq Presario CQ42 laptop with a spare 64GB solid state drive and Androidx86/6.0-r3 operating system. Note the DreamLab app does consume available CPU performance, so PC-based systems will need adequate cooling.
Regardless, if you have any Android-powered devices with at least Android 4.4/KitKat or later, plus a decent Wi-Fi-connected download quota if you’re not on Vodafone, this looks to be a very worthwhile way to do your bit (or bits) for cancer research.
CANCER CONTROVERSY
Our phones can participate in distributed analysis tasks like DreamLab and Folding@ Home, but what if your phone could instantly diagnose those funny-looking moles on your skin and tell you whether or not they’re cancerous? While smartphones have no trouble with traditional mathematical problem-solving, there have been numerous attempts to use them to handle more complex and specific health issues such as mental health or detection of melanoma (skin cancer).
For a number of years, researchers have been trying to develop a non-invasive method to correctly detect skin cancer using only images captured via a smartphone’s camera. But according to one study from 2013, some of those early efforts achieved ‘highly variable’ accuracy and that “three of four smartphone applications [tested] incorrectly classified 30% or more melanomas as un-concerning”.
But by early 2017, scientists at Stanford University had developed a technique using AI, testing it against 21 dermatologists trained to identify skin cancers. According to the report in the journal Nature, the computer algorithm achieved the same accuracy as the experts. The technique involves machine-learning tech from Google that creates a formula based on a library of some 130,000 skin-lesion images. The algorithm uses data mining methods to test new images against that formula and makes a diagnosis. The researchers say the algorithm exists on computers at Stanford University, but hope to make a smartphone version in the not-too-distant future.
MENTAL HEALTH APPS
When it comes to treating mental health, there’s no shortage of apps available. But there’s also no shortage of debate about their benefits. Research conducted by Monash University, the University of Canberra and University of Melbourne published in 2016 reported many mental health apps available in 2014 lacked
evidence proving their efficacy. Despite this, a new study from 2017 in the journal World Psychiatry involving 22 selected apps trialled on some 3,400 participants found that "smartphone devices are a promising selfmanagement tool for [treating] depression".
Yet, with so many mental health apps available, Mark Larsen, Research Fellow at the Black Dog Institute and University of New South Wales, says users should consider four things when searching for a suitable mental health app. One, don’t just look at the ratings — popularity doesn’t necessarily equal quality. Two, who developed the app — do they have experience in mental health? Three, what’s the privacy policy — what happens to the data the app records? And finally, evidence-based research — is there evidence the app is effective?
TIME FOR A DIGITAL DETOX?
There are growing concerns that smartphones could be as much a source of issues as they are part of the solution. Internet addiction has been a topic of psychology research for the last two decades, but in recent years, there’s been a growing focus on smartphone addiction, particularly amongst teens and children. There’s seemingly a constant flow of reports of young people displaying addictive behaviour to phones, with one rehabilitation clinic director telling a UK conference in mid-2017 that giving a child a smartphone was like giving them a gram of cocaine.
In 2013, a Smartphone Addiction Scale (SAS) was proposed by researchers in South Korea, built on the Korean internet addiction scale or ‘K-Scale’. According to 2016 figures from the US-based Pew Research Center, South Korea has the highest penetration globally for smartphone ownership at 88%, followed by Australia on 77%.
Not surprisingly, there’s been considerable growth recently in the ‘digital detox’ movement, of users seeking to cut back on digital screens for a period of time, anywhere between 24 hours to a month. The Australian Parents Council initiated a ‘digital detox month’ in September 2017 to help families set healthy boundaries for digital screen use.
This also comes on the back of the Australian Psychological Society’s 2015 Stress & Wellbeing Survey finding that 60% of teens "feel brain burnout from constant connectivity to social media". If you needed further encouragement for taking a digital holiday, research released in June 2017 conducted by the University of Texas, Austin, found that just the presence of a phone was enough to significantly dull the cognitive performance of study participants, even if the phone was switched off.
For help or information, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or beyondblue on 1300 224 636.
HEALTHY EATING
The signs appear to be more encouraging for other allied-health areas. The Good Tucker app, developed by Uncle Jimmy Thumbs Up aims to help indigenous young people make healthy food choices when shopping. The app has two modes — barcode scanning that returns a simple thumbs-up/sideways/down health rating, plus a non-packaged food database.
NON-INVASIVE GLUCOSE-MONITORING
Patients with Type I or II diabetes have to regularly monitor their blood glucose levels. Epic Health ( www.epichealth.io) recently announced the development of a non-invasive glucose-monitoring solution in the form of an app. The Epic Health app is undergoing trials with 2,100 participants. According to the company, it utilises the smartphone’s camera to snap pictures of blood flow through your finger. Those images are then whisked away for processing and the glucose reading is returned back to the user. At time of writing, there were no details on when the app will be available.
HEART-RATE MONITORING
There are a number of apps on the respective app stores that attempt to monitor heart-rate. Going by forum comments, some users seem sceptical of the concept, but the technique is very similar to ‘pulse oximetry’. The heart-rate measurement process essentially involves holding your finger against the phone camera lens while the on-board LED shines light on your finger. The phone camera identifies in real time the tiny but measurable changes in reflected light to record your pulse rate, which the app displays on-screen. However, some users report varying rates of accuracy with some app/phone combinations, so it’s important to investigate before you buy, but also to not rely on these apps alone — if in doubt, always seek medical advice.
Genuine pulse-oximetry, by contrast, uses red and infrared light to measure oxygen levels in your red blood cells.
THE FUTURE IS COMING
With billions of smartphones in circulation, it’s not surprising to find them being pressed into service, as researchers mine increasing amounts of data to find the elusive answers to curing cancer. Despite a lack of supporting research in early app examples, recent studies are now showing smartphones also have potential in helping users with mental health issues. However, concerns over the rise of smartphone addiction are not only seeing increased focus in research, but a growing appetite of users for ‘digital detoxing’, putting down screens to unplug and change usage habits.
So could it be that the best thing to do with your smartphone is leave it on charge for a couple of days and let it run DreamLab? No doubt, the Garvan Institute wouldn’t mind, but research is beginning to show that a little down time may be good for you as well. Still, as health-treatment costs continue to soar, the smartphone looks set to play a greater role in improving health outcomes.
It may well be that the secret to your future health is in the palm of your hand.