IBM's new health-focused venture, Watson Health, opened its headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts last week, amid the same kind of flurry of announcements and partnerships that marked its launch last April. A partnership with Teva Pharmaceuticals was one of the biggest headlines, but the company is also working with ICON, Boston Children's and Columbia Medical, and announced it just received a...
IBM has finalized plans to acquire Merge Healthcare for $1 billion, in the hopes that assets from the medical imaging software company can teach IBM's cognitive computing unit Watson to "see" medical images.
“As Watson evolves, we are tackling more complex and meaningful problems by constantly evaluating bigger and more challenging data sets,” John Kelly, senior vice president, IBM Research and...
Fitbit Surge
Fitbit sold 4.5 million activity tracking devices in the second quarter of 2015, resulting in revenue of $400 million, Fitbit CEO James Park reported in the company's second quarter earning call. He added that this compares to revenue of $114 million in the same period last year and represents year-over-year growth of 250 percent.
Since first launching, Fitbit has sold over 25...
In Apple’s second-quarter earnings call with investors, CEO Tim Cook highlighted three hospitals that were using the Apple Watch: Nebraska Medicine, Ochsner Health System, and London-based King’s College Hospital.
Nebraska Medicine, which Cook said is the latest hospital to adopt the Apple Watch, has launched apps that help doctors and patients communicate. The provider’s apps also offer doctors...
Apple has added Apple Watch support to three of its 22 enterprise apps designed in collaboration with IBM, including its app for nurses, Hospital RN. 9to5Mac first spotted the updates to Apple's enterprise app website.
"The Hospital RN app for iOS gives nurses the power to spend less time tracking down information and more time caring for patients," Apple writes on its website. "It uses iBeacon...
Since IBM launched its Watson Health business unit last month, the company has been busy, announcing a flurry of partnerships and deployments of its cognitive computing software in different sectors of the healthcare industry. Most of these announcements came out at the World of Watson symposium the company recently held in New York City. Here's a roundup of what Watson has been up to.
IBM Watson...
Apple and IBM have partnered with Japanese conglomerate Japan Post Group -- building on the partnership the two tech companies announced last year --to provide Japanese senior citizens with iPads that they can use to manage their health. Apple CEO Tim Cook hinted to reporters that the rollout in Japan could lead to similar ones in other countries in the future.
Japan Post Group operates post...
Modernizing Medicine has secured a $5 million investment, completing the $20 million funding round the company began last November. One of the investors in the round was IBM, through its $100 million fund to seed Watson innovations. The company is not disclosing the other investors. This investment brings the Modernizing Medicine's total funding to $49 million.
As we reported last fall, ...
Apple and IBM's "Retention" app for insurers.
Although the IBM-Apple partnership for enterprise mobility has yet to make a healthcare-focused app public, one is coming up in the first quarter of 2015, and the two companies are still planning to make healthcare a focus of their sales pitch, according to a job posting that went up recently, first spotted by 9to5Mac.
Apple is hiring a handful of ...
While a tiny percentage of Ebola cases are popping up in the United States and Europe, the epicenter of the disease is and remains in West Africa, an area where mobile health initiatives are often deployed, especially those that take advantage of text messaging and other short message services. Texting is a good way to educate a large swath of the population so they can identify symptoms of the...
