Digital Exhaust #197

Why body scans and AI generated commercials are a mistake

Welcome back to Digital Exhaust, a 33c weekly digest. Browse below the button for interesting links, rumors, and ephemera coursing through the healthcare ether. As usual, the letter has a tech focus with attention to the human beings that use it.

Not just for music anymore

Via Bloomberg’s Power On Newsletter, the new AirPods supported by iOS 17 are rumored to be able to check for hearing issues as well determine your body temperature.

This reminds me of the new HomePod I bought for my Austin house that not only plays music but detects for carbon monoxide. I guess it makes sense that if you own real estate in someone’s ear canal or kitchen, why not optimize what you do there?

Healthcare startup cautionary tales

Halle Tecco, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Rock Health, has an excellent rundown of healthcare start up cautionary tales -- What went wrong and what we can learn. We spend too much time glorifying isolated startup success stories without understanding how things sometimes don't work. It's a really interesting read, especially if you think everybody's gettin' rich fast.

Halle is a rockstar. And by the way, she was named one of Fast Company's most creative people in business for 2023. Healthcare needs more creatives in business.

When AI creates a commercial

This is a commercial designed start-to-finish by AI for a mythical ‘All Purpose Sauce’. It captures the bizarre aesthetic of machine-generated marketing. The fingers and mouths alone are worth a look.

“Please stop messaging me”

This Philadelphia internist was so overrun by portal inbox messages that he begged his patients to stop. And it worked. He tells his story in JAMA this week — It’s outside the paywall. The takeaway is that patients don’t always know what health professionals under, and a human appeal can sometimes be the most powerful.

Why body scanning is a bad idea

Neko, the health tech startup co-founded by Spotify co-creator Daniel Ek, has raised $65 million in its first external round of funding. Neko offers the promise of preventative healthcare via full-body scans backed by AI software that help doctors detect a variety of conditions.

I suspect this won’t work.

Any diagnostic study has to be considered in the context of a person's personal history or issues. What are we concerned with, and is this the study to confirm or rule it out?

Few people want testing. What they want is to know that they don't have anything horrible. But addressing anxiety with a self-imposed scan is a bad idea. You're likely to find incidental things that will fuel the fear. More importantly, the benefits of a rando scan will never outweigh the risks of chasing the benign stuff.

Understanding what people want is often different from what they ask for.

And streaming music is different than clinical diagnostics.

Zuckerberg's loose Threads

The battle for the world's 'public commons' heated up abruptly this week with the launch of Instagram's Twitter look alike, Threads. It's just Twitter without Elon Musk, which is really alot less entertaining. Either way, Zuck enjoyed a big fat corporate belly rub as he watched 40 million sign up. Elon has threatened legal action — and you have to admit, it’s an exact copy of Twitter.

And no one knows what to call what you create on Threads.

Everybody's doing the happy dance, as we always do with shiny new social platforms. But the honeymoon will pass and, if it survives, you'll see a desperate race to the bottom for visibility, followers and attention.

Healthcare on sale

Get a deep discount on healthcare during Amazon Prime days. Prime members in the U.S. can now get their first year of One Medical for $144 per year, compared to its typical annual membership cost of $199 (28% savings). One Medical is the primary care tech provider that Amazon acquired earlier this year. This is the first time that Amazon has added discounted healthcare to its selection of Prime Day deals.

Twinkies 2.0

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 10 years since the Twinkie made its glorious comeback. I enjoyed this one.

Thanks for reading and enjoy your weekend.