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If you are using Matlab on a MS-Windows PC with MS-Excel installed, there is no problem reading and writing data to Excel (in case your users/customers only understand this software but you still want to do the computations in Matlab). Here is the code to read (1st line) and write (2nd line): [sourcecode language=“matlab”] inputs = xlsread(‘inputfile.xls’, ‘inData’, ‘A1:B3’); [writeStatus, writeMsg] = xlswrite(‘outputfile.xls’, myMatrix, ‘outData’, ‘A1’); [/sourcecode] Now, there are several reasons why you may not be able to read and write directly to an Excel file: you have Matlab but ...

31% Tonight I was wondering what was Android market share in Asia. It is 31% according to a recent study from Ericsson’s ConsumerLab group ( reported by TechRepublic). Although dominant through most studied countries, Android is not dominant in Singapore (iOS has 46%), in Indonesia (RIM has 29%) nor in Vietnam (Symbian has 26%). Last year ABI Research released a study where they showed that Android-based smartphones market share grew from 16% in 2010 to 52% in 2011 (but this included tablets and did not cover exactly the same countries as the Ericsson study). Voila :-)

As WHO and other organisations are celebrating World Diabetes Day (WDD) it is always sad to read that a new potential drug is stopped. This time Merck & co. stopped the clinical trial MK-0431E studying the co-administration of Sitagliptin and Atorvastatin in inadequately controlled Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus. Merck cites “business reasons” without further explanations. Sitagliptin is sold under the trade name Januvia. It is an oral antihyperglycemic and one of the (if not the) best selling product of Merck with US$975 million revenue in the third quarter of 2012. On the other hand Atorvastatin is a statin lowering blood cholesterol. It was a blockbuster for Pfizer (sold under the trade name of Lipitor) until its patent expired. ...

Happy Halloween! It’s the season for Q3 reports a bit everywhere so also in Pharma: Abbott (↑), Elan (↑), Eli Lilly (↓), Bristol-Myers Squibb (↓), Sanofi (↓), Novartis (↓), Shire (↑), AstraZeneca (↓), Merck & Co (↑), Novo Nordisk (↑), GlaxoSmithKline (↓), … ...

Before: We had a fixed phone line at home. We had a fixed phone line on our desk at the office. There was a letterbox in front of the house and a pigeon hole at some central location in the office. And we were not reachable when sleeping, when in meeting, when commuting, … Now: We have a fixed phone line at home. We have a fixed phone line on our desk at the office. We have a mobile phone in our pocket or connected to the hands-free system in the car. The computers and tablet are running Skype or another communication software that shows every contact if we are “available”, “busy” or “not to be disturbed”. There are still letterboxes and pigeon holes but also e-mails, instant messaging, … The fixed lines fall back on the mobile if there is no answer after 5 tones. We are reachable when sleeping, when in meeting, when commuting, … People call you when you don’t answer their e-mail after 5-10 minutes. ...

After the T-shirt that measures your sleep better than an app, here is idea #2: the toothbrush that provides some feedback. The idea is simple - so simple it was already applied elsewhere. The idea is to provide feedback about the quality of the way people brush their teeth. The Brushduino focuses on entertaining kids to keep them brushing at the right place for the right amount of time. Other projects (with many variants) focus specifically on time spent brushing. ...

I don’t consider having more or better ideas than others. But I gradually realized I have less and less time for some activities like programming, electronics etc. Maybe that’s how we realize we are getting older now adults. So I decided to share these ideas rather than fueling the illusory idea that I will implement them one day. So idea 1 is about measuring sleep. I recorded animals’sleep during my Ph.D. - but it was thanks to an EEG device. I think that if you want to understand or improve something you have to first measure it in a way or another. So I started to try to measure my own sleep with an app ( Sleep Cycle). But despite its good reviews it doesn’t work, at least for me. ...

The US FDA recently approved Proteus Digital Health Ingestion Event Marker ( IEM). Basically, it’s a pill with some electronics attached (very tiny electronics: around 0.5mm in diameter for a total weigth of 5mg, see picture below). Once activated the pill transmit a signal and, coupled with a detector, you know when the pill got into your body. Edible sensor for electronically confirming adherence to oral medications. ...

As you probably know I am interested in both diseases (and health in general) as well as visualization. Recently Online Nursing Programs (*) invited me to have a look at their latest infographics about the effects of tobacco on health ( directly to figure). Although numbers seem correct (references are at the bottom), although they intelligently re-use the presentation of some well-known tobacco companies, there is one thing that I don’t like that much: like this sentence, the figure is very, very long. You have to scroll many pages in order to see everything. It may look like a story but it is not presented as such (I mean: there are no clear marks of different steps in the story, except the three “chapters”). On the right is the complete figure in exactly 800 pixels of height - can you read something? GOOD.is solved this issue by using a Flash player that allows the viewer to woom in/out and go to different sections of the figure ( see here for instance). ...

A few posts ago I wrote about my discomfort about stacked bar graphs and the fact I prefer to use simple table with gradients as background. My only regret then was that the table was built in a spreadsheet. I would have liked to keep the data as it is but also have a nice representation of these categorical data. This evening I spent some time analysing results from a survey and took the opportunity to buid these representations in R. ...