domenii

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#Opternative Online Eye Exam Gets You A Glasses Prescription From Home The annoyance of going to the doctor keeps tons of people from finding out

All you need is a computer, smartphone, Wi-fi and 25 minutes to take its test about

which lines look blurrier. Within 24 hours, Opternative will review your results and send you back a prescription you can use to get glasses or contacts anywhere,

or a meatspace brick-and-mortar glasses shop. Opternative is now the only approved online eye exam.

With enough awareness and the partnerships its working on with big Internet retailers, it could earn a fortune undercutting standard $50 to $100 ophthalmologist visits

and making the world see clearer. Opternative Test Software Eats The Eye Exam After graduating optometry school,

Dr. Steven Lee was sure that computers and mobile phones had to offer an alternative to traditional autorefractor machines used for vision tests.

He teamed up with serial entrepreneur Aaron Dallek to start Opternative out of Chicago. With a $1 million seed from Tribeca Venture Partners

Chicago Ventures, Healthbox, and more in early 2014, it added CTO Ayo Jimoh disclosure: He a friend from college,

and began perfecting its technology. A $2 million bridge led by Pritzker Group, Jump Capital, and previous investors pushed it through clinical trials.

Opternative Test Photolee tells me the trials were wild successand that regulators have deemed Opternative online test tatistically equivalent to the refractive exams done in the doctor office.

It now cleared in 45 states and is starting with availability in 27 of them.

To take the test, you just go to Opternative website and answer some eligibility questions regarding when you were last tested

and if you have any eye conditions. You calibrate your screen by measuring a credit card and sync your phone as a remote control for your computer over Wi-fi and an SMS confirmation.

The test takes about 25 minutes. You follow the dictated and written instructions to cover one eye at a time,

look at your computer screen, and answer corresponding visual acuity questions on your phone. How many lines are in a symbol?

Which of these symbols is a different shape from the rest? What colored number is in the surrounding dots?

For some tests, youl give your shoe size and be told to walk a certain number of heel-to-toe steps away from your computer before answering.

At the end, you can pay $40 to have Opternative review your results and send back an approved prescription for glasses or contacts.

It $60 for both. One caveat: If youe never worn corrective lenses, you can only get an immediate prescription for glasses.

Opternative Results Ie been finding distant street signs and airport gate numbers a bit blurry, so I took Opternative test myself.

and the remote control worked fine. The test feels a tad lengthy, but that enhanced my feeling that this was a medical-grade exam.

if it an X or an O. Being at a doctor office, you feel a sense of confidence that the results will be right

While Opternative reviews the results before issuing a prescription through its HIPAA-compliant site, it takes more faith that the test won be botched by some bad answers.

However, Opternative can detect eye-based medical conditions, so youl still need to visit a doctor every few years to check for those.

Screen Shot 2015-07-27 at 2. 13.15 PM Vision For The Future Until now the only ways to get eye exams were the doctor office,

house calls with specialty equipment, or expensive smartphone dongles like one made by Smart Vision Labs. Eyenetra is working on a VR headset-based test,

but Opternative is currently the only test you can take at home by yourself with no extra equipment.

Opternative could solve a huge problem for online eyewear retailers. Prescriptions are only valid for a year,

so if a glasses site potential customers haven been to an eye doctor lately, they can get the right specs.

It also building out a touch screen kiosk that could fit inside physical eyewear stores. Seeing clearly can help people learn,

And as the world shifts toward the information and knowledge economy, the value increases. Making accurate vision more accessible just took one bright eyedea.

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#Google Straps Aclima Sensors To Street view Cars To Map Air pollution If a city knows what intersections are full of smog,

Google earth Outreach program that equips nonprofits and public-benefit organizations with data wants to give the world these insights.

So today, Google revealed that it been working with SF startup Aclima for the last year

-and-a-half to attach air-quality sensors to its Street view cars. e designed our cities without data,

Aclima founder Davida Herzl tells me. Literally piggybacking on Google could let Aclima produce the data necessary to make urban areas easier on the lungs.

In the first pilot three Street view cars collected 150 million air quality data points over a month of driving around Denver, Colo.

They measured for chemicals that are hazardous to breathe, like nitrogen dioxide, nitric oxide, ozone, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, black carbon, particulate matter,

The goal is to make data like this available to citizens so they and their local governments can see pollution on their own streets.

Independent scientific analysis confirmed that the mobile sensor system worked for collecting street-by-street data

and could improve upon the regional network of sensors operated by the Environmental protection agency. Herzl says e hope that one day this information is as accessible as the weather.

Here a video on how the program works: Google has agreed now to purchase more of Aclima outdoor sensors for a bigger rollout to map air quality.

Aclima-equipped Street view cars will crisscross the Bay Area and other cities this year as part of the next big data collection.

The bootstrapped Aclima came out of stealth last month, detailing how it designs and builds its own sensors,

manages the network as they collect data, processes the data on its cloud backend, and produces analytics and visualizations.

The first project it announced was using indoor sensors to help Google measure air quality in its offices to optimize productivity.

For example by tracking conference rooms throughout the day, Google could determine if CO2 levels climbed high enough to degrade brain function.

If youe ever felt suffocated in a cramped meeting, youe not crazy. With productivity of its huge elite workforce translating into billions in earned or lost revenue for Google,

it has plenty of incentive to join up with Aclima. For now, its Street view partnership is more charitable.

Google earth Outreach will help organizations use the data to visualize air-quality problems in cities,

which could help them make arguments for fixes to city planners. Herzl explains that e know that trees absorb pollution

NO2 specifically. If we can know where pollution hotspots are, we can know where to put green spaces.

The Google partnership will allow it to rapidly scale the deployment of its sensors. This way, Aclima can pursue its mission to make a business out of improving human health through environmental protection.

There plenty more Google could potentially do with the data, though. It could allow Google maps to route cars

or pedestrians away from high-pollution areas to avoid exacerbating condensed pollution or breathing it in.

The ability to direct self-driving cars away from intersections where they might contribute to high-pollution zones could help convince cities theye a positive change.

Ie asked Google for a comment on these possibilities and am waiting to hear back.

Herzl concludes that Aclima sensors are producing social good out of the Internet of things, which is thought often of as just equipping homes with Wi-fi-connected appliances.

She tells me, here a whole new world of opportunities to make our cities healthier, not just smarter. h

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#Subway Teams Up With Paypal On Mobile payments Ordering your food or beverages by smartphone and then paying for it via an app is quickly becoming the new normal.

Starbucks already allows for this across thousands of its stores in the U s. Meanwhile, Burger king and Firehouse Subs announced integrations with Mastercard Masterpass digital payment solution just this week,

and Taco bell own mobile ordering solution is powered by Heartland, the companies also this week stated.

Now you can add one more to the mix: Subway and Paypal are working together to turn on Paypal Onetouch mobile checkout experience in an updated Subway app that work across the chain 27,000 U s. locations by the end of the year.

Subway had launched actually quietly a mobile payment solution in its app last fall, but only began discussing the details more publicly this May as it needed time to train staff

and work out the kinks. It still hasn made a huge, splashy public debut, however though that will change later this year as Subway begins to advertise its mobile ordering and payments app for ios and Android.

The app will allow Subway customers to build their sandwiches using their smartphones pay ahead of time (or while in line), then pick up their bag

and run when they arrive at the store. The sandwich chain mobile apps were created previously by Paydiant,

a company Paypal acquired this March for $280 million. A white-label digital wallet maker, Paydiant was known best for being the payments startup behind the mobile wallet from the merchant-owned network MCX,

led by Walmart, and whose members included Target, CVS, Rite aid, Best Buy and others. With MCX, the group of retailers had been developing its own alternative to Apple Pay with Currentc.

In addition Paydiant had built a number of other large business clients like Harris Teeter, Capital one, and yes Subway.

Now that Paydiant is a Paypal company, it moving to integrate Paypal Onetouch mobile checkout into the Subway application as another checkout option, alongside the app support for Apple Pay and Android Pay.

The benefit to using Paypal Onetouch is that it works across all apps where Paypal is installed.

This means end users only have to sign in one time in a supported app and then can skip logging in to Paypal the next time they check out in that same app or any other one.

For Subway the company believes that this sort of simplified approach to payments makes sense for its own customer base,

which also embraces a igital lifestyle. he Paypal customer base is very complimentary to the customer base that would frequent Subway restaurants,

explains Ken Moy, Director of Global Payments and Emerging Commerce at Subway. o bringing together the convenience of

what Paypal will enable us to further do with our mobile app is very much in sync with

what wee trying to do which is make it as simple as possible and as convenient for customers to buy sandwiches from us,

he says. Moy wouldn speak to the traction the mobile payments solution within the current build of the Subway app has seen to date,

noting that the company has only recently been making comments on a national level about the newer functionality.

However, he did note that the app has seen already retty good organic growth. e do see a significant increase of usage as well as significant use by repeat customers,

and the online ordering function on Subway website. e do anticipate this hockey stick will continue to happen as we put more resources to it,

Plus, Subway believes that the integration of the Paypal support will increase this usage even further,

For Paypal, however, its work with Subway is just the beginning of what the company indicates will be a series of announcements about Paydiant-built apps turning on Paypal checkout. ubway will be the most prominent initial launch partner for all that, notes Chris Gardner, cofounder of Paydiant.

But while Paypal purchase of Paydiant is helping it get a foothold in a number of mobile apps,

it will still have to compete with the other forms of payment, including Apple Pay and Android Pay,

that the businesses themselves will want to support. t the end of the day, many of customers will provide the ability to pay through multiple wayst not

either or it making sure customers can pay they way they want to, says Gardner. Subway expects its Paypal-powered app to arrive before the end of the year a

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#Google Loon To Cover Entire Country Of Sri lanka With Internet Google is working on many things,

and that includes balloons that fly high in the sky to bring Internet infrastructure to locations that can be wired for it easily.

Today, Sri lanka announced that it the first country to ever get universal Internet access from Google Project Loon.

Thanks to a partnership with Google, the country promises ffordable high-speed Internetfor all of its residents.

Google Loon was announced in 2013, with only incremental and anecdotal information hitting the presses up until now.

This is a landmark moment for Loon and clearly for Sri lanka. The foreign minister said in its announcement that Sri lanka was roud to declare that we are at the cusp of a reclaiming our heritage of being connected to each other

and connected to the world. In a few months we will truly be able to say:

Covered Additionally, the country notes that Silicon valley investor and Golden state warriors part-owner Chamath Palihapitya, helped their cause greatly by getting involved.

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#Google s Brain-Inspired Software Describes What It Sees in Complex Images Experimental Google software that can describe a complex scene could lead to better image search

Researchers at Google have created software that can use complete sentences to accurately describe scenes shown in photos significant advance in the field of computer vision.

the software responded with the description group of young people playing a game of frisbee.

The software can even count, giving answers such as wo pizzas sitting on top of a stove top oven.

most efforts to create software that understands images have focused on the easier task of identifying single objects. t very exciting,

a research scientist at Google. sure there are going to be some potential applications coming out of this.

The new software is the latest product of Google research into using large collections of simulated neurons to process data (see 0 Breakthrough Technologies 2013:

Deep Learning. No one at Google programmed the new software with rules for how to interpret scenes.

Instead, its networks earnedby consuming data. Though it just a research project for now, Vinyals says,

he and others at Google have begun already to think about how it could be used to enhance image search

or help the visually impaired navigate online or in the real world. Google researchers created the software through a kind of digital brain surgery,

plugging together two neural networks developed separately for different tasks. One network had been trained to process images into a mathematical representation of their contents

in preparation for identifying objects. The other had been trained to generate full English sentences as part of automated translation software.

When the networks are combined, the first can ookat an image and then feed the mathematical description of what it eesinto the second,

After that training process, the software was set loose on several large data sets of images from Flickr

The accuracy of its descriptions was judged then with an automated test used to benchmark computer-vision software.

Google software posted scores in the 60s on a 100-point scale. Humans doing the test typically score in 70s,

That result suggests Google is far ahead of other researchers working to create scene-describing software.

However, Vinyals notes that researchers at Google and elsewhere are still in the early stages of understanding how to create

and test this kind of software. When Google asked humans to rate its software descriptions of images on a scale of 1 to 4

it averaged only 2. 5, suggesting that it still has a long way to go.

though large databases of hand-labeled images have been created to train software to recognize individual objects,

Microsoft this year launched a database called COCO to try to fix that. Google used COCO in its new research,

but it is still relatively small. hope other parties will chip in and make it better, says Vinyals

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which together account for some 45 percent of the globe total carbon dioxide emissions, pledged to make significant efforts in the next 10 to 15 years to limit their CO2 EMISSIONS.

It the first time China has committed publicly to halting the decades-long rise of its CO2 EMISSIONS.

However, due to economic factors and policy shifts, China may be poised to achieve this goal even earlier than promised.

China meanwhile promised that its annual CO2 EMISSIONS which have increased by 257 percent since 1990, would stop rising by 2030 or earlier.

China also pledged that 20 percent of its energy would come from sources other than fossil-fuels by 2030.

when China economy was still growing at more than 10 percent a year, it was unclear

says Valerie Karplus, a professor of global economics at MIT Sloan School of management, and director of the Tsinghua-MIT China Energy and Climate Project.

But economic growth has slowed (it was 7. 7 percent in 2012 and in turn so has growth in demand for energy.

Also, this year China government has announced already a plan to reduce air pollution by taxing and limiting coal use.

Beyond that, carbon trading systems are now being tested in five cities and two provinces, and a national system is expected to come online in 2016.

In a recent modeling study that accounted for these new policies and assumed that China would accomplish ambitious near-term goals for expanding nuclear power and renewables,

Karplus and collaborators at Tsinghua University in Beijing found that demand for coal could peak sometime between 2020 and 2025,

and carbon emissions could level off sometime between 2025 and 2030. But, says Karplus, there is still uncertainty over

when China will begin actually reduce its emissions, and by how much. t makes a big difference

The pact is ugely importantfor global climate change policy efforts because China has agreed finally to a target related to urning its emissions down in absolute value,

says Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton university. The deal also has symbolic value,

since the world top two emitters have circumvented effectively the reigning geopolitical gridlock over international climate policy l

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The world wants mobile medical apps (MMAS) ##and demand won t slow down any time soon. The demand for remote patient monitoring is growing dramatically says Jeannette Tighe from the Healthtech Advisory practice at Sagentia a global technology advisory

By 2015##next year##at least 500 million smartphone users worldwide will be using health-related apps says Tighe who recently spoke#at MIT Technology Review s Emtech conference in Cambridge Massachusetts.

By 2017 the app market is projected to reach 26 billion users. Among its key drivers:

the world s aging population with its increasing need for medical care. In the United states alone Tighe notes almost 20 percent of Americans will be older than 65 by 2030 making them more vulnerable to Alzheimer s cardiovascular disease and other age-associated conditions.

This changing landscape is creating an exciting opportunity for the emerging area of connected health

Smartphone technology is promising for use in remote patient monitoring for several reasons. David Pettigrew Sagentia s Vice president of Connected Health sums up the advantages:#

#Benefits to medical device manufacturers include cost savings through not having to develop a completely new device leveraging existing platforms

and data capabilities and using an interface that consumers know and understand and is already part of their everyday life.

But the regulatory pathway for the use of smartphones and data aggregation has recently become much clearer.

and released draft guidance proposing deregulation of medical data aggregation systems. This clarification she says significantly reduces the risks of these opportunities for medical technology companies.

Currently most FDA-regulated apps are either stand-alone or act as accessories to existing medical devices and allow the smartphone to act as a##dumb-user interface

or a##data pipe to the cloud Pettigrew adds. However with the clearer regulatory pathway emerging concepts are now starting to push the boundaries

and are moving towards using the smartphone/tablet hardware and software to perform more advanced functions.

An emerging example of this is Setpoint Medical s implantable neurostimulation device (currently in development) configured via an ipad app.

This device is aimed at treating patients with debilitating inflammatory diseases. It consists of an implantable microregulator a wireless charger and the ipad prescription-pad application.

Addressing Two Critical Questionssagentia believes there are two critical questions for medical device companies entering this space:

First how do you develop a regulated MMA and incorporate it into a medical device? And equally important how do you make money from doing so?

In addressing the first question Pettigrew notes that successful MMA development starts with the right mindset.

This is not just another mobile app. It s not just a software tool he says.

MMAS should be treated like any other medical device. Risk analysis is key and careful system design will ensure that safety critical functions are implemented appropriately.

Once companies decide to incorporate an MMA they follow the same type of development roadmap used for any other medical device.

The presence of an app doesn t fundamentally change the methodology Pettigrew notes: First you need to define the intended use.

This is critical for defining whether the app will be regulated by the FDA and it identifies predicates.

You then need to map your core user requirements so that you understand what information is needed how it should be presented

and when he continues. Next is designing the high-level system architecture to minimize patient risk

and ensure that it is usable. The final step: development under the ISO 13485 medical device standard.##

##As an example of how to manage the risks of including apps in connected systems Tighe cites the Verihaler which Sagentia has developed to monitor patient adherence to treatment for asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD.

Verihaler uses wireless acoustic monitoring to provide valuable feedback to users physicians or other health-care providers promoting correct inhaler use

and rapidly detecting any deterioration in a patient s condition. The key to answering the question about generating revenue lies in defining the value proposition early

and optimizing the business model. In this environment there s the opportunity to be very creative with business models Tighe says.

Examples include pay-peruse analytics risk-sharing reimbursement and patient self-payment. She recommends defining the MMA s targeted value proposition and business model up front.#

#Doing that will help gauge the likely level of FDA involvement align with the company s business strategy

#Bottom line according to the Sagentia executives: With the regulatory situation becoming clearer and the cost of technology reaching feasible levels connected health

With such great opportunities available it s no surprise that many medical device companies have connected health on their agendas.

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