I, Medicine

Predictive bio-metrics and health optimization

The most important online applications to be developed since the birth of the Internet are less than a decade away, yet they remain largely off the radar of investors and web-developers. These applications are optimizers for the most important thing we have - our health.

A couple of years ago IBM released a report that stated that by 2011 the total amount of data in the world may be doubling every eleven hours. I believe that this prediction will be more than met by the surge in self-tracking devices that will be released over the coming years.
I am a member of a growing community of web-developers and engineers, doctors and scientists that believe that the gold that can be mined from this data is vast and highly valuable.

The spread of ubiquitous micro-trackers will make health data collection cheaper and easier. The self-tracking hardware and software will no doubt be unified by cloud computing and result in a 'perfect storm' of accessible and highly effective health optimizers.
It's an important convergence of technology and timing, as the successful inventor Ray Kurzweil notes:
"I quickly realized that timing is the critical factor in the success of inventions. Most technology projects fail not because the technology doesn’t work, but because the timing is wrong—not all of the enabling factors are at play where they are needed. So I began to study these trends in order to anticipate what the world would be like in 3–5 or 10 years and make realistic assessments."
Based on that logic, now is the perfect time to be developing online personal health metrics.
I'm convinced that in a decade this particular area will be pervasive throughout the consumer market as well as the extended medical industry.

Imagine if the computer industry was nothing but repairmen that tried to salvage PCs in the last stages of severe virus infections. It would be a pretty bleak situation, yet that is the current state of the health-care system. For the most part, people are only treated once they have become sick and even then with largely disappointing results.
The computer industry, on the other hand, has an endless supply of optimization tools that improve efficiency and user experience long before the computer has become 'sick'. Defraggers, registry cleaners and driver updaters are just some of the tools in use.
I believe that the coming decade will bring with it a surge in online self-optimization applications. I also believe that the results for people's health will go far beyond current expectations.

Our personal health spectrum covers a wide range - from perfectly healthy to perfectly dead. Unfortunately, due to scarce resources and a lack of technological adoption, our current health-care system deals with only the last 20% of the spectrum - people who are sick or dying. The remaining 80% is a vast untapped market that will finally be utilized by cloud-based applications that use data-mining and the power of crowd-sourcing to deliver individualized health optimization.


Our very experience of life is filtered through our current state of physical and mental health. Having less than optimal health fundamentally affects the quality of our lives.
Right now our health-care system is a largely disorganized, anemic beast that advances with painful slowness and inefficiency.
Thankfully, as medicine is gradually transformed into an information technology, we will see an exponential acceleration in advancement.
My concept is to take this one step further and open up our medical laboratories to encompass the great experiment that is the human race.
Every day billions of people test out drugs and treatments in their own homes, but this data is largely lost, or relegated to unreliable analogies. I am committed to changing that.

Humans are not very good at deciphering patterns over time. We can be good at recognizing patterns over shorter periods but over days or weeks our estimates becomes extremely poor. We often miss obvious cause-and-effect connections whilst at the same time making false positives. For example, someone might swear that a placebo treatment such as homeopathy cured their hay-fever whilst ignoring the fact that three days of rain had washed the pollen out of the atmosphere.
A personal biometrics system sees through all the statistical noise and is unswayed by personal biases or wish-thinking. It also has the potential to negate or eliminate the placebo effect from subjective results.
With large enough numbers and some clever algorithms I believe subjective reporting will eventually exceed standard double-blind, placebo-controlled studies for reliability and insight.

Yes, it is true that the self-quantification concept revolves around gathering subjective self-reporting data, which can be notoriously unreliable from a medical research stand-point, but the era of the Internet brings with it a new paradigm - truly massive numbers. Massive numbers of individuals from which to gather data, and, even more excitingly, massive amounts of data gathered on each individual.

I believe that in the next decade people will become increasingly comfortable with the idea of self-quantification. In fact, I believe that this paradigm-shift is already happening in society.
If you don't believe me or if you think that people will not be comfortable giving up so much personal information into the cloud, then I remind you that the same contention was raised about Gmail when it was first released.
The truth is, even though it sounds dreadful to have an email service that scans your emails for personalized keyword advertising, in practice it turns out to be a small price to pay for a fantastic free service.
I believe the self-quantification market will grow in very much the same way. After all, what better service can you provide than the gift of health?

I am convinced that in a decade or so we will see the refinement and clarification of our current medical knowledge as well as whole new discoveries and new avenues of research opened up by the power of ubiquitous tracking hardware and clever mathematics. Our job as developers and engineers will be to dig up the gold in these mountains of data.
The hardware is well on the way to becoming reality in our lives. From the Fit-Bit device to health-monitoring toilets (as we saw in a final-round proposal for Google's 10 to 100 project). Now all we need is a comprehensive, well-integrated, robust, cloud-based and highly scalable software solution to take advantage of this opportunity.

That is where my interest lies, and I'm committed to collaborating with others who are heading in the same direction. Not just because I think that there are fortunes to be made, but because I feel it has the potential to improve the health of millions, if not billions of people around the world.