Almost half of Americans take medication on a daily basis and 1 in 6 reports taking more than 3 pills a day. The Wall Street Journal Online/Harris Interactive poll reported that two-thirds of adults surveyed said they forgot to take their medication. Remembering when to take which pill and the frequency can be a difficult feat especially when you take a few pills a day. Forgetting medicine or accidentally taking too much can really impact your health and can be a matter of life or death. How can we become better at taking our medicine so that we stay healthy?

It’s really no surprise that there is an app for that! Designed and developed by a registered nurse, Pillboxie is an app that is an easy way to remember to take your meds. It’s beautifully visual in that it displays actual pill bottles on the screen and has 40 combinations of pill colors and sizes. A crucial feature of this app is that reminder alerts remind you take your medicine, even if your phone is asleep. Another cool thing is that you don’t need a network connection for this app to work! For now, it’s only available on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch.

Of course there are other pill reminder apps but this is absolutely the most visually appealing and has an easy user interface. You can log your pills, their frequency, and receive alerts when it’s time to take them. All we have in this world is our health and it’s important to take your meds correctly. If you need help remembering what pills to take when and often times forget, this app is perfect for you!

In recent blogs, we have been touching on technology within the medical industry. A topic that keeps coming up in our research is telemedicine. Telemedicine is the use of information technology and telecommunication to provide healthcare from a distance. What’s good about telemedicine is that it can help eliminate distance and mobility barriers and provide a new source for for quality healthcare that may not have been available previously in rural areas. Recent developments in the use of handheld devices can further help healthcare professionals, continuing to add to their ability to view and assess patient issues as if they were in the same room.

Earlier this year, the FDA cleared the first telemedicine robot dubbed “RP-VITA” by iRobot. Developed alongside InTouch Health, the Remote Presence Virtual +Independent Telemedicine Assistant is a tablet-controlled telepresence bot that helps doctors care for patients remotely. With a push of a button on an iPad, the doctors can direct the robot to a patient’s bed. Sensors allow for the robot to navigate busy hospital hallways avoiding obstacles along the way. Once in the patient’s room, the telepresence interface allows the doctor to check in on the patient as if he or she were in the room. One particularly cool feature allows for a two-way video in which the doctor can see and speak to a patient. There is even a zoom feature that allows the doctor to zoom in on the patient’s charts or examine their pupils! Amazing.

Seven North American hospitals are now using RP-VITA to allow doctors to be in multiple places at once. A huge benefit to this telepresence is that, when it is more universally implemented, any doctor in any part of the world could help any patient in need. In the near future, we will probably seeing more of these robotic inventions as telemedicine continues to grow exponentially.

British physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989. He began the first website to document the project. It’s funny to think that the first website was about the WWW project itself. The website described the basic features of the web; how to access other people’s documents and how to set up your own server.

This is it: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

On April 30 1993, the web was available on a royalty-free basis. The software was free for anyone to use and remains so today. Web usage exploded as people started setting up their own servers and websites. Twenty years later, there are an estimated 630 million websites online. Wow!

We all know texting and driving is bad news. Admit it; you’ve probably done it before. In this day and age, we are obsessed with our phones. We are constantly bombarded by messages but there are certain times where we need to think of our safety first. Did you know you are 23 times more likely to get in an accident when you are texting and driving than if you resist the urge? According to the United States Department of Transportation, that is the case. If you text at 55mph, it is like you are driving a full length of a football field blindfolded. This is an incredible risky decision people around the world make on a daily basis and is extremely dangerous. There are a couple apps we found that can help curb the temptation to text and drive.

Text-Star by Cinqpoint sends automatic responses to incoming texts that lets people know that you are driving and cannot get back to them right away. Before you head out on the road, you can select from a list of preset messages or create your own custom message that lets others know you are not available to respond at the moment. Although Text-Star is free, it is only available for Android devices. Cinqpoint says that it hopes to have an iOS version soon.

If your life is hectic and need to get to your messages ASAP, there is another app called DriveSafe.ly by iSpeech that reads your texts out loud so you can drive without picking up your phone and reading the text. This app helps you stay connected while reducing distracted driving by keeping your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. This is also a free app so you have no excuse not to try it out.

When it comes down to it, a measly text message is not worth your life or other people’s safety. Text messages can wait, no text message is worth your life. There have been a couple shifts in creating apps like the ones above to help texting and driving at a minimum. Try them out and let us know what you think! It could be a matter of life and death.

With all of the news on 3D printing, we thought we would put a funny spin on things with this picture. Enjoy!

Last week marked JH Media Group’s 10th anniversary. Here are some photos of the celebration. 

We celebrated at the Artini’s Art Gallery in Athens, GA!

We all had a chance to add to the JHMG logo!

Jason Long, our goofy CEO!

Our amazing clients and friends came to celebrate as well.

Our photo booth!

As you can see, we had a little too much fun with the photo booth.

MulticolorEngine is a service by Tineye Labs that helps you choose a color palette and then searches millions of creative commons images on Flickr to produce a collection of images in your selected color palette. The website claims it’s the best color search engine in the world. After playing around with it for a little, we realized it’s arguable the most fun.

We all are used to search engines where you enter a word and then it comes up with results that match your keyword. With MulticolorEngine, you enter colors and the results are a bunch of images that match those colors. You can choose any combination of colors and it will spit out a bunch of images with those colors. You can choose from one, two, three, four, or more colors and this service will show you a lot of images with those same colors.

This tool can greatly enhance your web development initiatives as you can pick the perfect images to match your color scheme. It lets you and your customers find images that best match a single or multiple colors. It can also extract a color palette from an image or a set of images that you upload. It’s automated, fast, accurate, and remarkable.  Try it out HERE!

The cornerstone to a healthy lifestyle is a firm dedication to exercise. Whether you are trying to slim down or build muscle, your smartphone can be a handy tool to act as your own personal trainer.

Here are three apps that can help you lead a healthier lifestyle through exercise:

• RUNKEEPER-  Join the more than 17 million people who are using RunKeeper to turn their phone into a personal trainer in their pocket! Track your runs, walks, bike rides, hikes, and more using the GPS in your iPhone.
• NIKE TRAINING CLUB-  Provides users with the experience of having a personal trainer with more than a 100 exclusive workouts, audio trainer guidance, and rewards and bonuses. Get motivated and maximize your results with this app.
• NEXERCISE-  Free fitness GPS game for weight loss, better health, strength training, points and rewards. This app is for you if your plan is to exercise, lose weight & gain motivation.

A healthy diet goes hand in hand with exercising. Your mobile device can help you make smarter choices when it comes to your diet just as well as it can help you exercise.

Here are three apps that can help you eat smarter to lead to a healthier lifestyle:

• LOSE IT!- Provides as easy way to keep track of your calorie intake from meals based on a vast library of food types. Ready to lose weight? This app can help you make your goal a reality.
• FOODUCATE- Lose weight and track your progress with this app that enables you to scan the barcode of food products while shopping and learn the nutritional value of the food you eat. Fooducate grades your food, explains what’s really inside each product, and offers healthier alternatives.
• RESTAURANT NUTRITION- Like to eat out at restaurants but having problems with picking healthy meals? This app contains nutritional information about menu items at more than 250 restaurants and enables users to track what they consume when they dine out. Contains 60,000 food items!

A solid night’s sleep is necessary to recharge your batteries and provide fuel for the following day’s activities. Your phone can enable you to catch some Zs and keep track of your sleep patterns to keep you in the know so that you can get a better night of sleep.

Here are three apps that can help you sleep better to lead a healthier lifestyle:

• SLEEP CYCLE- This intelligent alarm clock analyzes your sleep patterns and movements through an accelerometer. It wakes you during your lightest sleep cycle which is a natural way to help you wake up feeling rested and relaxed. This app has helped more than a million people wake up feeling rested and ready to take on the day!
• PZIZZ- Solve sleep problems and cure insomnia. This app aims to defeat insomnia and stay in deep sleep all night using binaural beats to put you in an ultra meditative mode that is conducive for sleep.
• DEEP SLEEP WITH ANDREW JOHNSON- This app is also good for insomniacs because it provides guided meditation and instructions for breathing to ease users into deep natural sleep. Reviews of this app claim that Andrew’s voice is deeply relaxing and has helped them fall asleep increasingly faster instead of tossing around in bed for hours.

On Monday, we wrote a blog article that explains how technology is changing the medical field. In that article, we explained that there is certain technology that helps doctors better communicate with other doctors so that you get the best diagnosis and treatment out there. That is the premise behind an idea dubbed “SharePractice”.

SharePractice is a social clinical reference that doctors use to collaborate on treatments, discover clinical research, and rate treatment efficacy. SharePractice allows doctors to search for thousands of diagnoses and find all the ways millions of doctors are treating them. Treatments can then be ranked by the community of doctors as well as dosage, duration, and frequency for every drug, supplement, or herb. What if you can’t find your favorite treatment? No problem! You can add it and then receive feedback from other doctors.

With this source of communication, doctors are able to share information and treatment options that have worked for them. This greatly changes the healthcare industry because, instead of calling or emailing one doctor at a time, this allows your doctor to ask questions and receive feedback from other verified doctors in their field. This ultimately helps the patient in the long run because they can receive access to the best treatment options that have worked for other physicians without bias from pharmaceutical or insurance companies. SharePractice claims it helps good doctors become great doctors.

Become a great doctor.

Health 2.0 is a new term that has been created to account for the recent shift of technology to the healthcare field. It’s apparent that technology is giving the healthcare industry a much-needed boost, from social networking tools to mobile apps that help patients live healthier lives.

It’s obvious there is a lot of promise in mixing technology and healthcare. Consequently, we can see some benefits to this shift to the Health 2.0 Era. First and foremost, using technology in healthcare can provide for a better diagnosis. This, in turn, will lead to more effective treatment. For example,  IBM has been creating a supercomputer known as “Mr. Watson” that can potentially help doctors to keep track of patient history, stay up-to-date on medical research and analyze treatment options.

Next, this shift of technology into healthcare can help doctors communicate with patients. New ways to use technology such as Sherpaa, offering patients medical consultations online and over the phone by top medical specialists, can help save you a trip to the ER. Not only does technology help with communication between doctors and patients, it can help the communication between doctors as well. Social networking between doctors can help doctors collaborate online on difficult cases which help the patient get better treatment in the long run. That’s the premise behind Doximity, a social network exclusive to physicians.

Finally, we have recently seen a rise in apps to help users live a healthier life by encouraging us to stay active, eat healthier, and sleep better. There have been pedometer apps that help track our movement, calorie counter apps to help keep track of our diet, and sleep apps that help keep track of how much undisturbed sleep we are getting each night.

Though much is still in the early and experimental stages, the advances in technology could help save money in health care costs and improve patient treatment leaving us to live a healthier life. We are curious to see how technology will alter the medical industry in the near future. In the meantime, we will keep an eye out for you.