Feb. 8 Media Roundup

Catch up on last week's news highlights from our social media channels below.

Stay in touch with us and current on the latest industry news by following along on our Twitter and LinkedIn channels all week.

mHealth and Tech

• Wearables of the future won’t just be limited to activity trackers. Wearable furniture, stealth wear, portable mind monitors and exoskeletons are some of the products being developed today.
• Are biological insights — typically confined to a lab setting and teams of scientists — coming to the cloud? Supported by funding from Andreessen Horowitz, former Stanford professor Vijay Pande is trying to make it happen.  
• In its first earnings report separate from Google, Alphabet emerged as the world’s most valuable company last week, knocking Apple from the #1 spot. 
• A newly released survey found that 31% of heart patients use an app or a device to manage their condition. 
• The New York Times spotlighted a tech power couple in New York, founders at Foursquare and Stowaway.  
• A neurologist “hacked” his mind to share it with a computer to pursue his dream of building better cyborgs and digitize human thoughts. Read up on how it went. 
• Glen de Vries and Barbara Elashoff write about how wearable data could make clinical trials safer for patients and provide meaningful data to the FDA.
• Researchers at the University of California Berkeley have designed a new wearable system that measures human sweat chemicals, calibrates the data using body temperature, and shares it with a smartphone, providing a real-time snapshot of the user’s health.
• President Obama is a big fan of tech gadgets and even uses a Fitbit to track his health metrics.

Big Data

• Big Data meets football. How Big Data, Internet of Things sensors and new analytics abilities are generating more information and changing football. 

• Rock Health released a new report, exploring the potential impact of digital biomarkers to better understand health and disease by translating big data into actionable insight.

• Will Joe Biden’s push to cure cancer allow access to crucial genetic data and remove other barriers?

Pharma and Life Sciences

• If you have a hard time with early mornings, blame it on genetics. Gene startup 23andMe’s new study found that some of our wakeup preferences are written in genes.  
• Did you know the FDA has set new goals for clinical trials in 2016? Expect to see quality, participation and transparency play a major role in the agency’s priorities this year.
• Does a worm’s lifespan hold secrets to human aging? Researchers are taking a look at this information which could impact how we try to extend human life. 
• Digital health startup Neurotrack has developed a simple, five-minute cognitive assessment test for earlier diagnosis of future Alzheimer’s patients.