Zygote Media Group, which provided the imagery for Google's modeling, has built Zygote Body with the code. It offers the same navigation and features. To support this launch, the Google Body team has built a new, open-source 3D viewer at open-3d-viewer.googlecode.com. Thanks to the work of Google engineers, any developer can now use the same kind of 3D model browser for her or his own project.

Google has tried out lots of neat-o knowledge projects in the name of "organizing the world's information," only to find that they aren't tenable parts of Google's for-profit plans. As Sergey Brin told us at Web 2.0 last year, Google has long embraced the "letting 1,000 flowers bloom" strategy. While it's now gathering a select few of those flowers into "a nice bouquet" called Google+, some great Google projects have gone open-source.

In November, Google did the same thing to Knol, its Wikipedia-like collaborative knowledge database. It relaunched as a service called Annotum, powered by WordPress.

What kinds of projects can you imagine building with Google Body or the 3D viewer?

The app is a Q&A platform that helps users find health information written by local physicians. The company says it has 5,000 physicians signed up for "virtual practices."

The app has one interface for doctors and a separate interface for patients. Patients can ask questions for free, and answers are delivered pretty fast, as I found out.

Warning: privacy advocates beware -- this app requires personal identity information, like name, age and location at registration.The app also asks if you want to share with Facebook, and it gives you a choice. That was good. I said no.

The app lists "trending" questions.

The questions most similar to yours scroll automatically to the top as you type. Doctors endure much in order to help the sick. One of the easier questions to print: "Can my co-workers catch my eczema?"

Many questions ask for advice about general themes: like baby care, and what to do with a fever.

I asked a purposely vague question, completely made up: "I have a rash on my foot, what is it?" A doctor, who was apparently real, provided an answer in about a minute through a push notification that sent me to the answer page.

The answer? "See a doctor." Thank you, doctor.

I asked another more serious question: "How many times should I change the gauze on my burnt hand?" No doctor had answered that question at the time of posting.

What is really interesting about this is that the catalyst for the app is the same catalyst that launched the blended learning movement in education. In order to free up time in the day, some portion of the teaching hours is devoted to online learning. This app does the same thing. The app works totally free of advertising and sponsorship from pharmaceutical companies so as to maintain trust and the feeling of objectivity.

Screenshot comes from iPhone image capture

Piniewski says young people in the United States are experiencing widespread hopelessness about their employment and insurance prospects for the long term. In part as a result, they are developing habits today that will aim them in very bad directions for their long term well-being. A data-driven realignment of our relationship with health, to move us away from crisis-prompted medical reaction and towards a culture of prevention and self-care, could not only help remake our society here in the United States. It could also help provide models that the developing world, where mobile device penetration is high but processed food consumption is low, could use to leapfrog our own experiences with self-destructive individual and collective behavior.

Many young people today "have very, very low expectations," Piniewski says. "They will be underemployed and underinsured for the rest of their lives." Yet they don't use the healthcare system until they are truly sick, Versel writes. "We have this model that completely misses everything," says Piniewski.

Critics might argue that a strategy based on mobile data tracking is invasive, authoritarian and wrongheaded when individuals should take (sole, individual) responsibility for their own health. There does seem to be some risks to such an approach, but I'd argue that the status quo is hardly a good scenario, either. If a high-tech, health-nut, tracking-obsessed hell is the pot of boiling water we land in when we jump out of an arguably dystopian present, that would certainly be a problem as well.

We write here all the time about data as a platform, about making new parts of life measurable and thus manageable, and about the big potential offered by mobile devices. Piniewski's interview is highly recommended for readers interested in those topics.

Indeed, the FDA is proposing a set of guidelines, outlining the types of apps that it plans to oversee. This won't be all apps in the "Health" category, but will include those that, in the FDA's words, "could present a risk to patients if the apps don't work as intended."

But the FDA says that it needs to do more to make sure that consumers and medical professionals are getting accurate information when they turn to their mobile devices for information and diagnoses. There are apps, for example, that warn breastfeeding mothers which medications to stay away from, ones that help monitor heart irregularities and ones that offer basic diagnostics and disease information (such as WebMD).

The FDA says it doesn't plan to review all medical apps. Rather it will monitor and approve those apps that are used as an accessory to an FDA-regulated medical device or that transform a mobile platform into a regulated medical device. Based on the wording in these draft guidelines then, the oversight will be geared towards apps that are aimed at medical professionals, not at the general public.

The general public is, of course, welcome to give the FDA feedback on these proposals. FDA is asking for consumers, health care workers and others to weigh in on its proposed guidelines during a 90-day public comment period.

I visited the Artefact office in Seattle last month and was shown the prototype at work on an iPad. The app, as yet unnamed, is designed to help doctors, administrators and patients manage patient care in a hospital. The colorful and eminently usable design is - I can only hope - a pointer to the hospital and doctor apps of the near future.

A picture can tell a thousand words. The image directly below is of the prototype hospital app from Artefact. Below that is a traditional hospital app.

A healthy, attractive app!

An unhealthy hospital app that should be euthanized.

The Artefact app has a dashboard for each patient, showing who the care group is and a chart of that patient's vital signs. Interactive infographics help caregivers understand the patient's health data.

The app employs modern Web design features. For example, there is a rating for each patient, fed by real-time data. Colored up and down arrows display whether the patient's health is trending up or down. It's a relatively simple feature, similar to ratings used in hundreds of 'Web 2.0' sites over the past five to six years. But simplicity is exactly what's needed in hospital apps, which have traditionally been bloated and overly complex. With this prototype app, a doctor or nurse can check the overall status of a patient in one glance. He or she can of course also drill down to the actual data points and check the patient's history.

Taking a cue from the world of social gaming, there is an end goal for the app. The target for each patient is discharge - that is, going home. To help the doctor track the patient's well being, the app has an "estimated discharge" task based system.

The Artefact app is designed to be a decision making tool, while also allowing the sharing of information among hospital staff (such as reports).

The above screenshots show an iPad app, but like any good modern Web app it will cross different devices. According to Artefact, while doctors will probably use tablets at the patient's bedside, unit coordinators may use their desktop PCs to see the status of patients and make plans for them.

Anything that simplifies hospital care and removes the need for complex medical apps is a great advance forward in health technology. Let's hope this is indeed the future of hospital apps.

For the healthy among us, these sorts of status updates serve as a good reminder of who we should steer clear of. But at a larger scale, this social data can give other warnings about where diseases clusters are occurring. And unlike the sorts of statistics released by the Center for Disease Control, this social data can be tracked in real-time.

That's the aim of a new startup called Sickweather. The company, which is still in private beta, wants to track the signs of sickness via social networks and generate maps so that people can determine who and where to avoid.

Sickweather wants to build a social network around this sort of information, but currently the startup is utilizing publicly available social data. By mining Facebook and Twitter for certain keywords, the company can ascertain where there are disease outbreaks.

Sickweather isn't the only company thinking about the ways in which our online data can be utilized to track illness. Earlier this week, Google noted that it was monitoring search patterns around Dengue Fever in order to track the spread of the virus.

Google says that it wants to be able to build an "early warning system" of sorts, and Sickweather's aims are similar, but usese social rather than search information. The startup insists that the publicly available data it's using right now is anonymized, and the company promises privacy protection as well. Tweeting that you're staying home from work because of a wicked cough doesn't mean that Sickweather will point to you as the vector or that it will offer any particular diagnosis about what illness you have. But taken with other people's updates, also complaining about similar symptoms, the company's algorithm will be able to pinpoint places to avoid.

The company plans to build out a number of apps for Facebook and Twitter as well as for mobile devices. Through these the company plans to offer different levels of access to data, from just being able to view generalized maps of flu outbreaks, for example, to more details about specifics and, as is the case with most social networks, to be able to share these with only certain friends and followers.

Privacy Concerns?

On one hand, Sickweather might raise some questions about medical privacy - do people want to be able to share this sort of personal information? But as the frequent Twitter and Facebook updates about illness demonstrate, people are already doing this. Sickweather hopes to be able to make better use of this information - at both an aggregate level, for certain cities for example, but also for people's own social networks.

WebMD, one of the leading Internet health sites, has released a mobile application for Android. The app has been available on the iPhone since Oct., 2008 and the iPad since March, 2010 so it is about time that an Android version has finally come to the table. The app has a variety of features to keep users informed (and their health data safe) wherever they may be.

One of the biggest concerns people have when using the Web or mobile applications is the ability for people to somehow find out about their potentially embarrassing conditions. The terms of use and privacy policy for WebMD are very long and comprehensive. For the most part, the app will track non-personally identifiable information like cookies, search terms, application activity and generic personal stats like age and gender. Upon download the application creates a random application number that cannot be tracked to the user. WebMD is certified with a TRUSTe Privacy Seal.

The mobile industry and the health industries are on a collision course. Healthcare in its various vertical integrations (big pharma, insurance, hospitals, physicians etc.) is the biggest single sector of the economy in the United States. Mobile is one of the fastest growing sectors and is a driver of innovation. Doctors are using mobile devices to help them understand data, perform new techniques and look up prescription information on the fly. Consumers benefit from the array of health data that has become available in the Internet Age, anywhere they go. In the middle of the tropics and think you may have Brazilian Trypanosomiasis? There is an app for that.

WebMD for Android joins its sister application, Medscape (also available for iOS), designed for professional drug research and information created by WebMD. Other Android health applications include iTriage Mobile Health and the Essential First Aid Guide, among many others. Do a search for "health" or "medicine" on the Android Market and take a look around.

The iOS versions of WebMD have been downloaded five million times. It is currently not available for BlackBerry or Windows Phone except through the mobile browser.

The GAIN team includes Nick Gammell, who spent two years doing financial modeling for YouTube and Google, and Robert Bailey, who was the lead visual designer for Google-acquired Picassa. It's rounded out by a Fullbright scholar who can do a one-armed pull-up and a software engineer with a demonstrated ability to lose weight quickly.

Given the backgrounds of the founders and the depth of interest in this market, GAIN is likely a startup to watch despite being a little confusing at present.

Call it "Sweatin' to the Oldies 2.0" or call it the quantified self, the application of web technology to improve real-world physical fitness is widely expected to be big.

RunKeeper lets users track their exercise experiences over time and share their performance metrics with friends. The service is a strong example of trends that O'Reilly AlphaTech is investing in and that the tech world in general is looking forward to: the tracking, quantification, benchmarking and socialization of previously off-line activities. Usually called "the Internet of Things," in some cases this paradigm extends to human activity as well.

You see, what appears to be a pretty straight forward running app is actually just the wedge to a much bigger opportunity. By leveraging many of the trends we've been tracking under the theme of the quantified self we see a huge opportunity in data being collected from a whole new wave of sensors such as phones, watches, shoes, video games and many that aren't even on the market yet. FitnessKeeper has the opportunity to layer social dynamics, expert advice, community and game mechanics to create value from this data and we think that's exciting.

The value of measuring almost anything, of course, is in being able to track changes. Apps like this are both enabling of and dependent upon peoples' willingness and ability to change their lives over time.

RunKeeper says it has millions of users, that previous investors participated in this round of funding as well and that it has now raised a total of more than $1.5 million.

Enter Streak.ly, a service in beta built by a group that includes Kyle Bragger, creator of the exclusive design and developer community Forrst. Streak.ly lets you set daily goals, tracks how many days in a row you've accomplished them (your streak) and reminds you each day if you haven't checked your daily goals off a list. It's simple, and I like it. We've got 500 invites to try out the service below.

Streakly will show you how many days in a row you've accomplished each daily task, and you'll see the longest streak you've hit per task. What's to keep you from lying? Nothing, except that the site FAQ says a kitten will cry every time someone does.

The first 500 ReadWriteWeb writers who visit this link can give Streakly a try before it launches. Check out the nice iPhone stylesheet that appears once you authenticate, too.

It's fast. It's satisfying. But if respected critics like Nicholas Carr have raised the alarm that Google's legacy search product might make us stupid - what might Google Instant do to our brains and thinking? There are at least two ways to look at the question.

"The normative influence of Google just got a lot stronger," Kevin Marks, a British Telecom technologist, former Googler and internet intelectual, said today on Twitter.

In other words, Google's influence over what we consider the norm, or what we take for granted as an assumption, regarding any particular topic, will become stronger now that we're instantly given suggested search queries and answers to questions we haven't even finished asking yet.

When the Great Google in the Sky interrupts you asking it a question and says (effectively) "don't even bother finishing, we know what you're going to ask and here's the answer" - how many of us might just concede to ask what Google expects we were going to?

Google Instant as a proscriptive and limiting influence over the boundaries of our consideration; that's something to think about.

Google Instant as Brain Stimulation

Think of this, however. Google executives said in a press Q&A session about Instant today that users participating in tests of the service quite often saw links they were interested in at the bottom of the page and then extended their search queries with text that would bring those results up to the top of the page.

Google Instant Search feels to me like a call-and-response exchange with the Google robots. "If I type this in, what are you going to say?" I ask. "Ok, I see that now, but what if I type this in" is the logical next step.

My theory: by making search a more interactive, call & response activity, Instant Search could stimulate mental activity, as opposed to Google making us stupid.

"That's very true," says Dr. Ellen Weber, President of the MITA (Multiple Intelligences Teaching Approach) International Brain Based Center in New York, "in that the brain holds multiple intelligences - and to engage more and diverse types of thinking is better than to engage less and with the same. Every time you do a thing the same way - you grow new neuron pathways for that same way of doing things. Do things differently, and engage your curiosity, and you physically rewire your brain."

Weber has written about how to use social media effectively to support healthy brain development.

The essential core of the idea is a timeless one, before Instant Search, before computers even: interact with new and different people and perspectives in order to expand your horizons and keep your brain functioning sharply.

Is that what Google Instant offers? I think it may; with its pleasing combination of rapid results, sneak peeks into potentially related topics as we begin to explore, and a responsive interface that encourages more sophistication in our interaction with search engines than the classic 2-word grunt-queries typically deliver. I'm not sure yet, but that's my theory.

What do you think? Is Instant Search a potential boon or bane for the health of our brains?

We're entering an era of location as platform, but should that location data be as fundamentally private by default as medical information is?

Location privacy is a timely issue here at the dawn of the location-enabled Web: ensuring that location information is subject to neither commercial nor government misuse - but is instead transmitted and accessed in a privacy-protective way - is essential to the long-term success of location-based applications and services. Beyond the risks to individualsʼ privacy, the present lack of privacy protection also creates market risks for the very companies seeking to capitalize on location services.

That's well put, but does location data need to be default private like medical information in order to prevent misuse, and to support an economy of innovation? Some people believe that it is the culture of sharing by default that makes location-based services what they are.

As writer Kit O'Connell said in our Google Buzz chat on this topic: "people will never treat location like medical data, because they are so willing to give it up to the world in so many cases. It becomes an issue of surveillance vs. sousveillance." Sousveillance is outward-facing surveillance. Location-based social networks offer not just a way for us to be seen, but a way for us to see what the rest of the world around us is doing. Checking in to a location is interesting not just so other people know you're there, but so you can see who else you know has been there as well and what they said about it.

Of course exposure of your location is going to be opt-in on all of these services, but the locations you choose to check in at ought to be public on some level so that interesting services can be built on top of them. See Gowalla's new API, for example, or our post What Twitter's New Geolocation API Makes Possible.

Of course it would also be good to let users limit exposure of their location in certain situations to certain circles of friends. I might be happy to check in at certain establishments if that was only made visible to a select group of my friends (not my family) and to other people checking in at that location, for example.

But treating location data like medical data sounds like a recipe for shrouding it in complete privacy by default. Not allowing information about our activities in public... to be public... would be a real blow to the location-service ecosystem.

Samuri on a Cell Phone photo credit: rumpleteaser.