South by Southwest Interactive is picking panels for its 2009 conference.

True to name, SXSW is making the selection process interactive, asking folks to vote and leave comments.

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Click here to vote

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Sprigley’s proposed a panel:

“Killing Us Softly: The Failure of Technology in Health Care

It’s a feature not a bug, health and well-being are social and communal while our technology in this space is sterile and mechanical.  How do we bring health technology into our communities?”

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After we spoke at Health 2.0, we stopped by SXSW 2008 and had a blast.   Check out our write up of the experience on Read Write Web, a major Web 2.0 blog, where we talked about health and well-being getting hot with consumer technology and design folks and Microsoft and Google making waves.

SXSW 2009 promises to be even more fun.  Less about consumer technology companies building the “pipes,” more about how to use them to create a value layer on top that provides a killer consumer experience.

The Louisville African-American Think Tank hosts a series of round table discussions.

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Click here for more pictures

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Their first issue was “Health, Technology & Disparity” and they invited Sprigley, who previously spoke at their Health Summit and is kicking off a project with them at their newly launched Learning & Technology Center.

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Discussions focused on racial and economic disparity in the delivery and quality of health care  - as well as potential solutions including community-based programs and technology using local learning centers and cell phone as access points.

The audience included community leaders, health care folks and policy makers such as Democratic Senatorial Candidate Greg Fischer.

Swing by www.Sprigley.com and check it out.

Sprigley has a bunch of new features and a new look:

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New Sprigley Features and Look from Sprigley on Vimeo.
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Click on the picture above for a tour.

First up, you’ll notice that Sprigley has an animated sprite dancing about - after all, shouldn’t accomplishing your own goals for your health and well being be fun and delightful?

Sprigley now asks some tracking questions then gives you a My Day report that shows you how you’re doing, in different categories like exercise, nutrition, sleep, stress, productivity, kindness, etc.

When you click on any of those buttons in My Day, you’ll get personalized resources, picked for you based on how helpful they are for people like you!

My Portfolio has some ways to see how you’re doing at a glance, how you’re doing in various categories that make up your health and well-being, and a way to see your own patterns - for instance, how does your being kind to people affect your stress and nutrition?

There’s a way to send yourself reminders, a way to see community discussions involving people like you and discussions popular with people like you, as well as ways to see how people like you are doing, how they are making decisions and a way to find resources that work best for people just like you - as well as people completely different from you!

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The new look is a work in progress.

Over the next few weeks, you’ll see Sprigley progressively cleaned up, formatted, polished and made all pretty.

You’ll also be seeing new features and functions added all the time.

So swing by www.Sprigley.com and say hi!

Since then,  they have launched a Leaning and Technology Center in Louisville’s West End, the roughest part of the city where they provide free internet access and computer training to community members.

They’ve invited Sprigley to work with them on an African-American Health and Technology project.

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Click here for more pictures from the center

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Community members can now go the the Learning and Technology Center to access Sprigley and learn about their health and well-being and find personalized information.  For those who need help, the center has dedicated personnel and is working with nursing students and nurses in the community.

We thought a mascot was in order!

A character that’s cute, clumsy, a little sly and generally approachable:

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Click here for animated video

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His name is Spriggan

(Cornish for a type of sprite or elf).

Does it look like it’s something for kids?

Maybe.

But couldn’t we all use something to make us smile?

And shouldn’t accomplishing your own goals for your health and well-being be delightful?

For cancer survivors, folks who have stared down death and won, there’s nothing tougher than eating right.

Only 1 in 6 cancer survivors are able eat five servings of fruits and veggies according to a new study in May’s Journal of Clinical Oncology.

They had better success rates quitting smoking or exercising regularly than making healthy food choices!

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Surprised? Most people are. So why exactly is it so hard, for any of us, to eat right?

First off, a good number of folks simply can’t cook. One recent study found that over 8 out of 10 adults couldn’t boil an egg – almost equal rates among men and women.

And most of these folks aren’t relying on family members to do the cooking – they’re simply eating out – eating a lot of fast food. Most studies put the average American eating 3-4 meals at a fast food hut every week.

For folks who can cook, it can be tough to figure out what’s healthy and what’s not. Salads can have more fat than deserts – almost every product says low fat or organic and most of them don’t agree.

Even when people are highly motivated to eat better because their life or recovery depends on it, a good number simply have absolutely no clue where to begin.

So what to do?

We need support systems for basic lifestyle changes. We need personalized tools that empower us to make everyday, practical healthy choices that we need and want to make.

Tools that:

1) Recommend personalized recipes for you based on your preferences, the number of folks in your household, how much you want to spend, how tough a dish is to make, and what percentage of the ingredients meet the healthy nutritional standards. Give people something like this that shows them what’s healthy and how to make it – something that saves them time by learning what they like and recommending those things – something that’s fun and lets them explore.

2) Have nutritionists giving tips and basic how to.s – and recommends those links along with the recipes. Connect folks directly with nutritionists allowing them to see someone’s resources – what they’ve been reading, what’s they’ve been making, what they like and what works for them.

Stay tuned…

Photo courtesy of Gak, used under this Creative Commons license

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A couple of companies, noticeably Southwest, take a different tact. They don’t take themselves too seriously and the treat deadly serious subject matter with a light, jovial touch. Check out this post about April Fool’s Day on their blog featuring embedded YouTube videos. Even on the planes, they have fun; their flight attendants banter, tease, and jest.

And, amazingly, people don’t run shrieking from the plane. Instead, they’re tickled. Turns out people like to be treated like they’re human beings, like they’re intelligent enough to distinguish between what’s serious and what’s not and able to lift important information out of its humorous wrapper. Turns out they’re even more receptive to information - because - of a fun delivery.

Sprigley thinks that health care could take a page from this book. We work in health care and we can’t stand reading most of the materials. Want to engage people? Try delighting them. Part of that means writing in a conversational style. Check out www.Sprigley.com for our take on it.

Photo courtesy of M.V. Jantzen, used under this Creative Commons license

South by Southwest is perhaps best known for music and film, but there’s no better tech festival than SXSW Interactive.

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Click here for more pictures from SXSW
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After speaking at Health 2.0, Sprigley took a little time to check out cutting edge tech, design & user experience at SXSW 2008.

SXSW sports a different culture than Health 2.0 - less blue blazers, more blue hair. But health care heating up and Microsoft’s session was standing room only.

Health care folks would be wise not to write off these kids clad in black and toting Macs. As they’re coming into the space, they’re making ‘crazy’ demands, like real value for interacting with a product and a great user experience.

For more, check our write up on ReadWriteWeb.

This Spring Fling was organized around the theme of “Connecting Consumers & Providers.”

Sprigley spoke and walked close to 500 health care and web folks though a demo to a standing-room-only audience.

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Click here for more pictures from Health 2.0
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The panel was entitled “Health 2.0 as a Health Management Tool” and Alex Drane, President of Eliza and Larry Leisure, President of iMetrikus presented alongside Sprigley with commentary following from Joe Gifford, Chief Medical Officer of The Regence Group, Ranae Whitmore, a super-user know as Heartgirl from Daily Strength and Alexander Domaszewicz, Principal of Mercer.

Here’s a screen-cast of the demo.

Read Sprigley’s overview of trends from the conference at ReadWriteWeb, one of the preeminent technology blogs.

Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP Search & User Products, just posted about Google Health on Google’s blog. “Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful. Through our health offering, our users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online.”

She goes on to describe things that set Google Health apart: Privacy and Security; Platform; Portability; User Focus.

It will be fun to keep an eye on this.