Health

Statbel, the Belgian governmental organisation for data and statistics, just released mortality data for 2014 ( press release in French, dataset). The headline of their press release was that, for the first time, tumors were the first cause of death for Belgian men. Diseases of the circulatory system remains the main cause of death in Belgium, for women and for both sex together. While the death of someone is a bad news in itself, I’m more interested here in the evolution of death causes. I’m interested in the evolution of causes of death because it might be a consequence of the evolution of the Belgian society and, as a proxy, of any (most) developed, occidental countries. ...

Many headlines stated today that UK wants to tax pharmaceutical companies again in order to contribute to a pooled fund against antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The proposed ‘pay or play’ mechanism is a bit more subtle than that. The report ( full text here) is also suggesting other financing mechanisms (including the improvement of existing ones) as well as describing potential non-financial measures to reduce these resistances in the first place. Actually, financial measures occupy only about 6% of the report. But headlines need to be catchy. Let’s see a broader picture on tackling antibiotic resistance … ...

As I moved to a new office, I met new colleagues and one of them brought her own coffee machine and placed it on her desk. It’s a bright red Nespresso machine, a kind of statement that the owner doesn’t drink the free coffee offered in kitchenettes on all floors: Given that the company has a professional Nespresso machine downstairs (i.e. similar quality of coffee but with capsules of different shapes), I was wondering if this is really worth buying. The calculation is simple … ...

… At least in the minds of people. Marketing is a powerful persuasion tool and you sometimes need a few early applications to create the impression that something radically new came and is changing an area. I like to listen to podcast while doing repetitive activities that don’t require my brain too much. One of the podcasts I listen to is the Clinical Air from the Pharma Talk serie. A few weeks ago, I listened to episode #14 about consumer electronics in clinical research. It was all about the Apple HealthKit. In a sense it was very interesting to hear about it as it contained more details than its Wikipedia page for the moment ; another top-level summary of its capabilities is found in this Rahlyn Gossen’s blog post (Rahlyn was one of the guests of this episode). Episode #14 was published on July 21, 2015. ...

With more than 2,400€ collected, our team - Bordet’s angels - can be proud, for a first participation! We are 12th of more than 100 Belgian teams. One key learning is that the gold, old paper display still works better than anything else to raise money. And it was fun for me, a bit itchy in the end. But with the right trimming tools, this goes away very quickly. Thanks for all my supporters ;-) - your support is worth a thousand thank-you! ...

We’re nearly halfway through Movember, the month we grow our moustache in order to raise awareness about men’s health. I am in Amsterdam, for a congress and this was the hardest day of the month so far: since 8am, nearly every single person I met said it didn’t look good. And this can be harsh when you talk with (potential) business partners! However, practically, when you have time, this is an unique opportunity to initiate discussions with others about prostate cancer. ...

I recently read with interest Dr. Gammino’s post on how geospatial data and microplanning is helping the CDC and its partners to work towards the eradication of polio. There Dr. Gammino describes the hurdles faced by healthcare workers in countries where census data is often missing, where political, seasonal and geographical variations are making these more difficult. The description of the different social structures in urban or rural areas was also interesting. But the post also highlights how “social mapping” and geographic information systems (GIS) are helping understanding where the population resides and helping reaching them (here for polio vaccination but this could be for other purposes: maternity care, child care, etc.). ...

With a few days of interval I received two very different ways of reviewing data collected by users of “activity trackers”. The first one came from Jawbone (although I don’t own the UP, I might have subscribed to one of their mailing-lists earlier) and is also publicly available here. Named “2013, the big sleep” it a kind of infographics of how public (and mostly American) events influenced sleep of the “UP Community”. Here data about all (or at least a lot of) UP users were aggregated and shown. This is Big Data! This is a wonderful and quantitative insight on the impact of public event on sleep! But this is also a public display of (aggregated) individual data (something that UP users most probably agreed by default when accepting the policy, sometimes when they first used their device). ...

After a bit less than 2 hours, jepsfitbitapp retrieved my sleep data from Fitbit for the whole 2013 ( read previous post for the why (*)). Since this dataset covers the period I didn’t have a tracking device and, more broadly, I always slept at least a little bit at night, I removed all data point where it indicates I didn’t sleep. So I slept 5 hours and 37 minutes on average in 2013 with one very short night of 92 minutes and one very nice night of 12 hours and 44 minutes. Fitbits devices do not detect when you go to sleep and when you wake up: you have to tell tem (for instance by tapping 5 times on the Flex) that you go to sleep or you wake up (by the way this is a very clever way to use the Flex that has no button). Once told you are in bed the Flex manages to determine the number of minutes to fall asleep, after wakeup, asleep, awake, … The duration mentioned here is the real duration the Fitbit device considers I sleep (variable minutesAsleep). ...

After previous posts playing with Fitbit API ( part 1, part 2) I stumbled upon something a bit harder for sleep … Previous data belong to the “activities” category. In this category it is easy to get data about a specific activity over several days in one request. All parameters related to sleep are not in the same category and I couldn’t find a way to get all the sleep durations (for instance) in one query (*). So I updated the code to requests all sleep parameters for each and every day of 2013 … and I hit the limit of 150 requests per hours. ...