When I was at SXSW, I spent most of my time at either Big Data or Healthcare sessions. The interesting thing is that the Big Data sessions always devolved to talking about healthcare and the healthcare sessions always spoke about Big Data.
One aspect of the fusion of big data and healthcare that kept coming up was personal health monitoring. And since SXSW I have spoken and listened to a few folks (@dpatil, @rodrigoATCG, @nagle5000, @syntheticzero, and Sanjiv Shah) exploring measurement, self-analysis, and health devices.
Back in 2004-05, I worked on a product called Lifeblog – it collected all your SMS, MMS, photos, and videos into a timeline on your PC. It was way advanced for its time, and pointed to a future where we would cache our life’s stream of data. Working on that set me off thinking of sensors, lifestreaming, visualization of personal data (one set of discussions around visualizing recorded mobile phone usage data involved a colleague who left Nokia to set up @futureful – yes Nokia dabbled in this space once), my vision for what was supposed to be Ovi, my interest in lifestream aggregation, and a dotted line all the way to me getting involved in Big Data and Healthcare and Life Sciences in my role at IBM.
So, what do I see today in terms of these personal health devices?
At HIMSS in February, a big healthcare IT event, there was a whole section promoted by Qualcomm that was about mobile health measurement devices, such as the Asthmopolis inhaler sensor, and many mobile cardiac monitors. Also, there is a strong move (disclaimer, IBM is a big promoter) of the Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH), which calls for sensors to provide independence to the patient, care to be provided outside the clinic, and constant monitoring for adverse events.
Nike Fuel was all over SXSW, and FitBit is expanding their their product portfolio. IBM is involved in the (young-mom) activity monitor BodyMedia. And here’s an article of the VC behind the gamified (shudder) heart monitor, Basis. And 23andMe’s Linda Avey (@lindaavey) started up a company (with Mitsu Hideishi, @syntheticzero) called Curious, specifically to explore how to make personal health data available to the (non Quantified Self) masses.
And of course, I don’t need to go into the amazing things happening in the Quantified Self world. Here’s an exciting post of a recent meet up. Look at all the projects!
More recently (and what triggered this post) is the news (link via @erigentry) that FourSquare founder, Naveen Selvadurai, is getting into health monitoring. Nothing captures the attention more of investors than some successful entrepreneur entering a new field that most mainstream folks have not thought of.
Innovation from the outside
One thing that hit me is that whatever arises from the fusion of Big Data and personal health measurement, it will come from outside the healthcare industry. Part of that is because in the healthcare industry, they are thinking of hospitals, chronic conditions, FDA, reimbursements, privacy, and so forth. Too much baggage, I think.
I had hoped that payers would see the importance of tracking health outside the clinic, especially for incentives or rebates on paying for care. My thought now is that they will end up buying someone rather than building something.
Which leads me to my realization that folks outside the industry have none of that baggage, have oodles of experience in consumer web services and data visualization, and, perhaps most importantly, view these devices as curious toys that are begging to be played with in interesting and novel ways.
But the challenge is not to alienate the non-techies who are interested in keeping an eye on their health, but are not as driven as the usual QSer. QSers are the bleeding edge of all this. My brainwave here and excitement is how to being this to the rest of us, making the ideas of QS more mainstream.
“It is NOT about the data but how it inspires”
This quote is from Rodrigo Martinez (@rodrigoATCG) from the IDEO healthcare practice. It dovetails nicely with a comment from DJ Patil (@dpatil) that, “OK, so my super intelligent scale tells me I’m fat. But I can see that looking in the mirror.”
“Inspire” is what I’d expect from an IDEO designer, and that’s fine. But for me, it’s really about motivation – how to stay interested in my health, effect the changes that need to be done, and be proud of my accomplishments. I don’t think “gamification” (as in badges and levels) is the answer (and I find it a bit tacky). I think there are more positive ways to motivate people – competition, social pressure, monetary incentives (and of course, I’d love to see the health plans get involved – even perhaps mandating).
What behaviors are we trying to promote by making this data visible to people? And, more importantly for anything that tries to optimize a parameter, what should we measure? Obviously the parameters we measure should represent something we wish to modify (isn’t the whole point about modifying a behavior to maintain or improve health?).
What do you think?
Next Monday, I’ll be in Minneapolis participating in a predictive analytics event. I’ll be part of an executive roundtable, a breakout session on predictive analytics, and a general audience talk on the Predictive Power of Big Data Analytics in Healthcare. One thing I will touch on is the fusion of Big Data and personal health monitoring (another reason for this post). I’m sure I’ll get a lot of feedback on this topic – the event host is a device manufacturer with some monitoring devices of their own.
I also wanted to point out that IBM, my employer, published last year an excellent report on “liberating the information seeker” and The Future of Connected Devices (download PDF). I highly suggest you read it if you’re interested in this space.
So, what do you think? Do you use any of these devices, even just a heart rate monitor while running? A pedometer? What do you think will be the way we bridge the intense measuring world of the quantified self to a user of a device who just needs a little help to stay healthy?
Of course, this post is about devices and personal health. I see some interesting opportunities with personal medical records. But that’s a different aspect of Big Data and healthcare and best left for a different post.
I’ll leave you with a video of a well-used healthcare monitoring example at IBM – the Data Baby. Read the case study too (PDF). Disclaimer, I am part of the team that sells the streaming analytics product used for this project.
Image from dpstyles™ (There’s a weird cognection behind this image: I searched for CC images of Nike Fuel on Flickr and came up with this one, which I thought was pretty cool. When I looked at the other images, I realized this was Dennis Crowley’s stream. This post was triggered by a the Selvadurai news item mentioned above. Weird.)
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