Tag: reports

Apple’s Platform for Wellness Arrives | Life as a Healthcare CIO

John Halamka, the CIO of Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center in Boston has an interesting post on his blog about Apple’s big unveiling yesterday and its implications for connected health applications. With the image of naked Jennifer Lawrence still fresh in our minds, Halamka points out that Apple is taking steps to make sure no such slip-ups happen in the context of protected health information – a promising new market for wearable technology. As Halamka sees it, we’re on the cusp of revolution that will see the consumerization of what he calls “healthcare middleware.” That refers to software and services, like Apple’s recently announced HealthKit, that aggregates data about your body from multiple sensors in your clothing, your body and environment. Unlike the nude selfies that recently made the rounds online, however, health data is protected by Federal legislation – HIPAA. For that reason, Apple keeps that data local to the mobile […]

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IEEE Issues Standard For Sensors, Tiny Machines

A new standard published by the IEEE may accelerate the spread and use of the Internet of Things: providing a common reference to govern the performance of  microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS.   The standard, IEEE 2700-2014, was recently approved by the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) Standards Board. It will provide a common methodology for specifying the performance of tiny sensors that are becoming more and more common in consumer electronics and other industries. That should make it easier for vendors , including Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to begin integrating two or more sensors without having to worry about integration challenges. The standards apply to a wide range of small sensors that currently populate everything from mobile phones to wearable devices like Apple’s newly announced smart watch. These include accelerometers, magnetometers, gyrometers and gyroscopes, barometers and other pressure sensors, humidity sensors, temperature sensors, ambient light sensors and proximity sensors, IEEE said. “The industry has been struggling […]

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Cyber Insurance Is Sexy

So bland is the insurance business perceived to be, that it’s the stuff of Hollywood comedy. In the 2004 film Along Came Polly, Ben Stiller played a skittish, risk averse insurance adjuster with actuarial data on bathroom hygiene at his fingertips (no pun). Woody Allen famously depicts his hapless criminal Virgil Starkwell locked in solitary confinement with an eager insurance salesman in the 1969 mocumentary Take the Money and Run. Cruel and unusual punishment, indeed. Boring though they may be, insurance markets are incredibly important in helping society manage risks of all sorts. Insurance markets also have a funny way of shaping behavior – both personal and commercial – in ways that serve the public interest. Take the response to Hurricane Sandy as just one example. Law makers in Washington D.C. may never agree on whether that storm was a product of a warming climate. In fact, they may debate the […]

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Home Depot Acknowledges Breach of Payment Systems

Almost a week after public reports named Home Depot as a possible victim of a sophisticated cyber attack, the home improvement giant has acknowledged that it was hacked.   In a statement on Monday, Home Depot said that an internal investigation confirmed a “breach of our payment data systems” took place. The breach affects the company’s U.S. and Canadian stores, though not its Mexican locations or online transactions, the company said. The incident also appears to have been long-lived. Home Depot estimates that the breach dates to April, 2014. The company did not say when it was finally shut down – though that date could be as late as July. Home Depot has been investigating the incident since it was first disclosed by Brian Krebs at the blog Krebsonsecurity. Krebs was alerted to the incident after large quantities of stolen credit cards began appearing on cyber criminal forums. Sources at […]

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Ahead of Apple’s Announcement: The Security Implications of Wearables | Trend Micro

The world’s attention will be focused on Apple this week and on the topic of wearables. In an event on Tuesday, the Cupertino company is planning to unveil the latest additions to its popular iPhone line along with a wearable device that most folks are just calling the ‘iWatch.’ But as Apple wrestles with the security of its growing stable of mobile devices and the cloud infrastructure that supports them, what will the impact of wearables be? Well, the folks over at Trend Micro are putting together a series of blog posts that look at that very question. Namely: the (information) security implications of wearables. It makes for some interesting reading. Among other things, Trend There are three very broad categories that we can use to describe what we are talking about. The posts, by Senior Threat Researcher David Sancho, break down the wearables space into three categories:  ‘IN’ devices like sensors, ‘OUT’ […]

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