Concept development for final presentation

What part of the system of how we care for bodies, or how we make and maintain our buildings, interests you the most?

Personally, I am more interested in the system for bodies, rather than buildings in terms that there are several things that could be changed when we inform people proper and useful information. Besides maintaining building has different approaches to make changes, but the most influence way to change more relies on architecture society. Once the building are built, there are not many options left for dwellers to make an impact. In addition to that reason, I believe the system that takes care of our bodies will also impact on maintaining building in terms of behavioral changes. How would it work?

What are the anomalies and failures that irk you?

Most of apps we’ve tried in the class didn’t really reach to the level of completed product.
They paid too much attention to inform more information to consumers, but didn’t take account of the way
to give information to consumers. Of course, the reliability of information does matter as far as users can
perceive what data does mean to them. However, listing series of numbers with unfamiliar measurement don’t really
feed users with information. Those data should be accompany with readability at some degree to impact users’ behavioral changes, for instance : compare with something people are familiar. Giving easy analogous for info.

Besides the issue of the way inform data to users, there is another issue of app, it’s not pervasive to the life of an user. The action of turning apps on and off on daily basis is tend to be forgotten very easily. And this issue is simply explained by short duration of usages.

What possibilities do you see?

Yet, there are a few apps and devices, which are very much pervasive to daily life. Nike fuelband and fitbit are good samples for this example. These devices don’t require user to log in and off every time they use. Once after user wear them, they track information automatically and even transfer data wirelessly. By minimizing the action of tracking, and make it pervasive, it helps people to use it for long term without being bothered with concerning about logging on and off. Sooner or later, this type of wearable devices will be dominant in the market, pairing with smartphone as main computation tool.

So for my final presentation, I will research on the future of wearable technologies.

Opening Data to Public.

How would the Medical Health care system be like in the near future? The Chief Technology Officer of the United States, Todd Park who was co-founder of two successful health information technology companies foresees it positive with the execution of liberating and sharing data collected and managed by government publicly. Last year, Park has launched a new Presidential innovation Fellows program and the idea of the Program is to bring in creative people and entrepreneurs from outside government to work with innovators inside government. Park believes that opening government data to work, amplifying the impact of innovation in health industry. Likewise, the demand of opening data has gained substantial attention, as it would be much benefited by liberating it. Then what other benefits would we get by opening data?

First of all, collecting quantified data of individual would lead medical industries radical innovation in terms of preventing disease by analyzing data.

Evidence 1) Organizing and analyzing all quantitative data of individual raises an ability to predict the future, with goal of early intervention preventing diseases from happening in the first place. Here is a discrete example of how data can help patient get better treatment. In pediatric, among their various checks, nurses chart a baby’s heart rate once an hour. This is very standard practice at most hospitals, but Carolyn McGregor, a professor of health informatics at the University of Ontario, Institute of Technology, says it leaves a lot of critical data to waste. While a baby’s heart beats around 120 times a minute, it is the pattern of those beats over time that that can give early warning if something is wrong. With the help of Watson, IBM’s supercomputer that trounced the top Jeopardy! champions last year Ms. McGregor analyzed live streams of provided heartbeat data in a project nicknamed “data baby”. She found patterns that revealed signs of infection 24 hours before the baby showed any visible symptoms. In premature babies, advancing treatment by even an hour can be life-saving.

Evidence 2) Potential possibility of data analysis has been already proved by the influx of huge capital investment from large insurer companies. One of the actions arose among insurer companies are contracting with dozens of technology suppliers, including several to manage and analyzing its data with computer. One of the main goals is to use computers to make the human decision-making process more efficient, says Elizabeth Bigham, vice-president of health IT strategy for WellPoint. Among those technologies, wireless sensors are also seen as a way to control costs associated with the ageing population Motion sensors in beds, walls and floors of elderly people’s homes can track patterns in activity and movement to predict devastating falls. Researchers at the Sinclair School of Nursing at the University of Missouri are identifying patterns of restlessness during sleep and changes in physical activity that precede a devastating fall or visit to the emergency room.

Conclusion) Likewise, appropriate usage of collective and quantitative data is not only providing a better quality of medical service with less procedures patients used to go through before they get a treatment from hospital, but also bringing economic efficiency to the medial industry by replacing men-labor with trained computer system.

Second of all, opening and liberating data to public in computer readable format will bring more entrepreneurs to the medical industry, amplifying the impact of data on behalf of the improvement of people, which will eventually reshape the structure of medical industry as well as brining innovative atmosphere to the current medical provider.

Evidence 1) Collecting data itself meaningless until it will be encoded and analyzed with specific purposes. In Datapalooza, hold by Chief of Technologies Officer, Todd Park, releasing data to creative entrepreneurs in computer readable format. Using health-related data from federal and state agencies, and other sources, entrepreneurs are creating new applications and services that help: consumers find the best health care provider for their families; doctors deliver the best possible care, which reshapes the typical way of patients getting a treatment from medical institution. For example mHealthCoach is a mobile application that helps patients find the right health care providers, communicate effectively with them, and manage their own health.

Evidence 2) Those apps services created from datapalooza and elsewhere are clinically proven by medical experts and recommended by them to improve patients medical treatment. Furthermore, there is an app that displays positive result out of its usage, and its name is, indigo. IndiGo, a clinical decision support tool developed by Archimedes, Inc., is an application that relies on open government data, personal health data, and an individual’s choice to provide an overall health status. Archimedes tested IndiGO in a clinical setting of 12,500 patients at Kaiser Permanente Hawaii and the results were astounding. They found that: A 13% reduction in five-year cardiovascular disease risk from use of IndiGO (compared to the existing EHR and decision support tools). A six-fold increase in fill rate of new statin prescriptions among patients who were shown IndiGO (compared to patients whose doctor used a standard care gap tool).

Conclusion) This is just beginning of data opening innovation to the medical industry. Now the way of primary care for patients is going to significantly change in terms of tracking and preventing their possible disease. Much more accessible treatment will be provided to patient with less cost and procedure by getting rid of unnecessary and complex procedure of current medical treatment mainly based on large medical institution. Furthermore, the success of data opening movement will encourage more companies to be involved to lead more innovation to medical industry.

What would be the best way of maximizing the impact of opening data into public to improve the quality of medical treatment for patients other than the evidences above it? What would be the next step of opening data for medical revolution? The next step is now combining these entrepreneurships into current medical industry, not as individual business model, but as cooperative model. By combining these two different innovation into one, it would create a credential and concrete service.

Quantified Self-Movement

Quantified Self-Movement for Health Care.
Give examples of how you would imagine using data to monitor your own health, or the health of someone you care for.

What do people usually do to maintain their health? Go to gym and having personal trainer, eating organic food at whole food, seeing physicians or therapists regularly and so on. Besides the listed activities, we are doing tons of other things to keep ourselves healthy or at least not sick. Then what would be the most important elements of being healthy among the listed activities? I insist that the answer is a bit different from what I have listed above, as it is not an action or certain behavior, but it is a mindset. The answer to the question is consciousness of one’s body condition and knowing what one does everyday. For instance, people who do not have special medical condition normally don’t try to remember what kinds of food they have consumed during a week. How much of portion of food during the week is taken by MacDonald? How much vegetables and fruit did you consume? How much calories did you take? How much water did you beverage in a day? Was it water or soda? What time did you have meals and how many times in a day? A set of simple routine information of a person could be very useful in terms of self-reflective diagnosis tool and reading this information should not require knowing any medical jargons, it is simply readable and is easy to know what is good or bad for your body. Of course, it could be used as specialized medical treatment when it is stored as data and provided to trained physicians who can give specific treatment or suggestion according to data you collected. But these types of information are hard to get not because it requires expensive medical equipment to track or record data, but because collecting data of your body would not be set up to your priority list in a day and then it gets forgettable. What if we could closely track all of daily activities information without paying too much attention either being distracted from our main priority activity? And here comes the necessity of collecting quantified data of daily activities with mobile technologies. Even though current version of most smartphones have a limited functionalities to do track and record automatically, rather it is close to manual, we can imagine how far it can be developed in the near future as portable medical device.

Then, let’s create a futuristic smartphone designed to track our daily activities information with advance. How would it be working as tracking and recording device and how would it help improve our body condition?

Positive side of collecting qualified data collection.

1. In personal level, collecting qualified data of personal activities can change one behavior merely by reading and interpret it. It would be not a level of interpretation of medical professional, but getting to know the list of tracked and recorded actions of a person will make you far more conscious about your health condition and people would interpret their data and reflect to have a better life condition.

2. Collecting quantified data on daily basis will provide significant amount of interpretive data to physicians and therapists for better diagnosis of patients. It is more precise than statements of patients in terms that it is a collection of objectified numbers of data. (This fact could be also counterpart. Data could be wrong.)

3. Having more data set would simply benefit by having more case studies to understand better about our bodies. By far, we normally take medical treatment when we feel something wrong with our body, but then we only have a limited access to the data we get it after diseases arise. However, there are huge invisible and unidentified correlation between our daily activities and diseases, which should be further studied to prevent disease.

Counterpoint for collecting quantified data of our daily activities.

1. Collecting quantified data of a personal activities would be much more useful when it would be provided to the public for case study, but yet there are privacy issue of who will have an access to it and what if they can abuse these types of information?
2. The essential value of one’s life is not placed on merely living long or healthy. Setting on limited “given” guideline that is created by the collection of quantified data of people’s activities would restrain the variety of life style.