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.