Letter from CITRIS Director, Paul K. Wright Dear CITRIS friends, California’s health care challenge is big. And it is getting bigger. A host of excellent new—and expensive—life-extending procedures, our aging population, and the growth of administrative costs drive steep annual increases in the percentage of federal GDP consumed by health care costs. In 2000 it was 13.8 percent; today it is over 18. And while those fortunate enough to have good insurance and access to top hospitals get excellent care, many of California’s residents are tragically underserved. The CITRIS Health Care Initiative is our big effort to employ IT to tame costs and boost access, making excellent and affordable health care available to all Californians. …read more >> Wholesome Data: Using IT to Promote Healthy Behaviors The journey to health is made of hundreds of small, daily steps: the decision to take the stairs, not the elevator; to eat veggies, not fries; to bike to school, not drive. Edmund Seto employs sensor and cell-phone technologies to connect people to relevant, real-time data about themselves and their environments, creating applications that make the journey of small, healthy steps easier to navigate and stick to. For example, CalFit is an Android-based program that tracks and monitors the caloric expenditure of users. The original prototype, designed to help teens struggling with obesity, was made before the reign of smart phones. Seto, Associate Adjunct Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and the new Associate Faculty Director of CITRIS’s Health Care Initiative worked with Berkeley Professor of Engineering Ruzena Bajcsy, who was then the CITRIS Director, to cobble together an Internet tablet, a mobile GPS, an accelerometer, a heart-rate monitor, and a radio transmitter. Users wore the device, which recorded heart rate and activity type and informed the wearer about how many calories he was burning and when and where he was burning them. Seto composed an algorithm to convert accelerometer data from the CalFit program into caloric measurements, so that a user could tally up calories burned based simply on sensor-detected body movements. Bajcsy and Seto tested the CalFit system in the real world with the help of Jay Han, who runs a pediatric muscular dystrophy clinic at Davis. …read more >> Upcoming Events Oct 26: Bridging Photonics and Computing A Research Exchange Seminar Speaker: Mario Paniccia 12-1 p.m. Sutardja Dai Hall 310 Banatao Auditorium Oct 28: To the Dark Side: Efficiency and Demand Response Through Commercial Building Lighting Controls An i4Energy seminar Speaker: Charlie Huizenga 12-1 p.m. Sutardja Dai Hall 310 Banatao Auditorium Nov 2: Whole Systems Design Approach of Cities in China A Research Exchange seminar Speaker: Harrison Fraker 12-1 p.m. Sutardja Dai Hall, 310 Banatao Auditorium more events >> follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | unsubscribe Copyright © 2011 The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society. All rights reserved. CITRIS Headquarters and the Banatao Institute@CITRIS Berkeley University of California, Berkeley 330 Sutardja Dai Hall, MC 1764 Berkeley, CA 94720-1764 |
CITRIS Newsletter October/November 2011
