The landscape of digital mental health apps: huge unmet needs, quality concerns, app stores asked to ensure transparency

Address­ing the men­tal health cri­sis (Phar­ma Field): Each day we find out more about the men­tal health effects of the pan­dem­ic. Ear­ly on, the Office for Nation­al Sta­tis­tics found that one in five Britons report­ed symp­toms of depres­sion, com­pared with one in 10 before. And, accord­ing to a recent study led by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Nottingham…

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The FDA creates new Digital Health unit to reimagine regulatory paths in the age of scalable, AI-enhanced innovation

— Med­i­cine Is Going Dig­i­tal. The FDA Is Rac­ing to Catch Up (Wired): “WHEN BAKUL PATEL start­ed as a pol­i­cy advi­sor in the US Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion in 2008, he could pret­ty much pin­point when a prod­uct was going to land in front of the review­ers in his divi­sion. Back when med­ical devices were…

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Next: How to best civilize the mobile brain health and brain training Wild West (Tip: Consumer education may help more than pure regulation)

UC River­side Pro­fes­sor Slams Feds, Stands By His Health App (KQED): “UC River­side pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy Aaron Seitz had an idea for a mobile health app based on his area of research.…Seitz is the aca­d­e­m­ic behind UltimEyes, the vision improve­ment app that got dinged by the Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion (FTC) for $150,000 last week for mak­ing deceptive…

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Expanding the brain health toolkit with mobile neurobehavioral tests — aka a “brain thermometer”?

Army touts ‘brain ther­mome­ter’ as front-line tool (Army Times): “Army medics will soon use what’s been dubbed a “brain ther­mome­ter”: a mobile phone appli­ca­tion that can, with­in min­utes, pro­vide health pro­fes­sion­als data to help diag­nose and mea­sure a sol­dier’s injuries… The Defense Auto­mat­ed Neu­robe­hav­ioral Assess­ment, pro­duced by Anthro­Tron­ix, includes 

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