NPR tells an interesting story of the success of medical apps and teases it with the headline Patents Lead the Way as Medicine Grapples with Apps. The story contains the expected cautions, reports that Happtique has been founded to" reviews apps and gives those that at least perform correctly a seal of approval, and contains one doctor's opinion that if people are looking at their smartphones a number of times a day they can be put to good use by building a heightened awareness of what's going on with blood pressure or another key indicator. My favorite stories—a woman who has successfully used an app to achieve weight loss and the doctor already mentioned who has used an app to diagnose medical emergencies on an airplane. However the change is driven, it's got to keep coming. 

Food delivery by drone seems inevitable. This report, by CNN this time, brings word of Taco deliveries by a couple of Yelp engineers—complete with fabrication of the drone by 3D printing and an iPhone app. What's new this time is a date. The inventors look forward to making deliveries in 2015.

Boggles my mind:How in 2013 can "we" continue to ask should doctors email w/ their patients? http://t.co/aB0RIN8sLi And that 68% still don't

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) June 21, 2013

As if confirming the unplug news this week, Neil Gaman has announced that he's withdrawing from social media for a while:

“I feel that I’m getting too dependent on phones, on Twitter,” he said. “It’s a symbiotic relationship. That instant ability to find things out, to share. I want to see what happens when I take some time off.”

I take a pretty small view of my health data, and Nick Wingfield even uses the term small data to when he writes at the Bits Blog at the New York Times of the information collected by the Fitbit I use and other devices. It seems strange to think enthusiastically about big data when the revelations about the NSA and PRISM are headline fare, but Wingfield convincingly show how data collected from many individual users could be put to beneficial predictive use

An individual’s biometric statistics — call them small data — could get a lot more intriguing and useful for everyone if they were pooled into giant vats of data from thousands or even millions of people. Researchers are starting to use body sensors, including the ubiquitous smartphone, to glean a deeper understanding of how behavior, environment and other factors are related to disease.

Coincidentally, Ginger.io, one of the apps that appears in Ryan Panchadsaram's video features here, too.