Grandma Gets Social Health

Health is a major reason behind the recent surge in American's over 50 using social networks.

According to report today published by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, Americans aged 50 and older are growing fast on social networks, jumping 47 percent last year. The report states, "The appeal of social networking for older Americans may also be related to managing health issues.... people living with a chronic disease are more likely to reach out for support online." 

This is clearly just the beginning, as we move across the continuum of care from chronic disease to wellness and prevention, the coming years will see health and wellness related social support activities move online, and with this fast moving trend, social health will become an integral part of our lives.

Social Health and Game Dynamics Rally Forward

With the framework of the social web becoming established over the past decade, Seth Priebatsch at TEDx Boston declares that the next decade will be focused on the game layer - how to leverage game mechanics to influence and make fun previously difficult and uninspiring tasks.  Gaming dynamics will be applied to education, sales training, as well as across social health.

Lose Weight with Your Natural Team

Losing weight is hard. To lose weight in a healthy way requires commitment and determination. While some people try to lose weight on their own, others reach out to peer support groups with structured programs to help them along the way.  While these artificial support groups can be helpful, many people still fail to reach their goals.  Why?

Modern society has restructured our lives over the past 50 years. Gone are close knit communities of century's past where people lived and died among the same social community in the same locale. Today, we may move multiple times, have several jobs and exist in a couple of different communities across the country all within a single decade. Our lives have become fragmented, and in the process, our natural support system that were historically present to help each of us make healthy choices and support us in our quest to improve ourselves have been severed.

Your natural support team includes your family, friends, colleagues, and communities (such as church).  These people are your natural support network. They want to help. That is why they are part of your life. But how can we tap into these strong ties in today's fragmented, twitter-paced world?

Just as technology ripped apart our natural support network, new tools are now emerging in the form of social health applications across the web to help bond our fragmented social lives together.  Social health applications built on top of social networks will create more cohesive relationships where feedback, support and motivation will all be leveraged to help you succeed in all your endeavors, especially those difficult health related endeavors like losing weight. So, get ready to tap your natural team. The social health revolution is just beginning!

Calorie Counting to LifeLogging...Serious tracking!

If you think counting calories or tracking how far you walk is going far to achieve a health goal, then you'd be blown away by the marathoners of personal tracking, lifeloggers. Last night at the Bay Area Quantitative Self meet up, Gordon Bell shared a decade long project he's been working on to digitally log everything about his life called MyLifeBits. Gordon has been wearing a sensecam off and on for the past five years which takes a picture every 20 minutes of what he is doing.  He also wears an audio recorder to capture conversations.  He says he's recording a few gigabits of data each month. Gordon sees collecting health information and sharing of that data as the biggest benefit of his experiment. He sees the social health wave coming.

Measure, Share, Repeat, Success - The New News

Very quickly, cool new tools are coming to market to help measure and share your health vitals. Want to track your weight loss? Withings is a new scale that can tweet your weight or post it as a status update on Facebook so your friends can share in your progress. Want to sleep better? Zeo is a sleep monitoring system that tracks your sleep effectiveness and suggests ways to improve your sleep.  Want to know how many calories you are burning? Fitbit is clipped onto your clothing and tracks your steps taken, distance traveled and sleep quality.  These are just the beginning. 

Having data is one thing, but data shared becomes news. And news is cool. People like news.  People like to talk about the news, especially when the news can make a difference in the world around them. So make some news and make the world a better place.

Social Health Rising

Social health is the use of your social network to achieve health-related goals.  Social health will profoundly transform health and wellness in this decade as our friends, family and colleagues become more integrated into our real-time lives in support of healthy behaviors.

Social health is rising now because of the convergence of many forces including: the dramatic increase in connectedness as a result of the opening up of everyone's social graph across the social web; the development of inexpensive, accurate and mobile health diagnostics; new research proving the positive role social relationships play in health outcomes; advances in wellness behavioral economics; a growing emphasis on prevention as a result of healthcare reform; fresh insights into human motivation; the emergence of population level wellness metrics; a growing zeitgeist around health and wellness; and the development of new social web applications that support and motivate healthy behavior.

Having spent the past decade living at the center of neurotechnology innovation, funding, and public policy, I've had ample time to think and write about what neuroscience has to offer the future of humanity. I'm convinced that while the opportunities being opened up by advancing brain science are vast, the one area that has the potential to make a quantum impact on health and wellness in this decade is neurosoftware for health and wellness motivation. So, that is where I am heading.