If 2007 was the year of Twitter and 2009 the year of FourSquare, 2011 will be recalled as the year of the Quantified Self, say trend spotters. Individuals are using gizmos to collect, analyze, and share personal health data in real-time on social media. Our obsessions, it would appear, are moving from the outside world to our innermost beings.
“Singularists”
envision a future where your energy level, mood, sleep pattern, and even stool can be consistently monitored and analyzed as you drive home from work, shower, eat, brush your teeth, and sleep. The goal is to help you monitor your health and heighten your self-awareness.
Cyberspace is already playing a role in lifelogging, but it is now poised to recombine with biotechnology. Genetic assaying is moving beyond the research lab and its familiar association with paternity testing to become a tool to reverse fatal diseases.
Yuri van Geest, whom I met at the recent MLove ConFestival in Berlin, is a business and venture capital adviser for the research group Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology. He told me about a stealth startup that will analyze the DNA in a single drop of blood to help Africans provide lifesaving treatments for tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV.
New developments in microfluidics, the manipulation of small volumes of fluid and nanotechnology, have already been tested in Rwanda to help health workers complete an ELISA test instantaneously, rather than sending it to faraway labs for results that may take days or weeks.
The novelty of the Harvard-MIT venture is that the data will be collected by health workers and analyzed instantaneously in cyberspace over a most ubiquitous tool: the smartphone.
Mobile sensors are already available for monitoring heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose, sleep, pathogens, and chemicals in the environment. But these sensors can often give false positives -- a lack of accuracy that can be particularly unwanted in testing for something like HIV.
In a matter of months, this new project hopes to produce a mobile DNA sampling interface that will render the current technology obsolete and provide more granular results in the field.
Currently, only 0.2 percent of the human genome can actually be read -- at a cost of $5,000. It could be five years before the full genome can be read at the same cost. “Zero cost DNA profiling is what we are heading towards,” says van Geest.
This is why his project is targeting Africa, which offers the economies of scale and scope Western Europe would not.
Harvard-MIT must be lauded for its initiative to extend the benefits of mobile health and DNA testing to Africa, but ethical issues hover over the project, including the privacy of DNA data. Also, who owns that data -- the sampler or the sampled?
— Vineeta Shetty is Chief Creatrix of Vistara, an independent communications consultancy based in Mumbai.
As you stated, " only 0.2 percent of the human genome can actually be read -- at a cost of $5,000" leaves me to think that the resouces to actually read a person's genome is in question. The amount of physical hardware as well as programming that has been in place over the years regarding the Genome Project has been enourmous. And from all of the data already collected and compiled, I find it hard that a start up company will have enough hardware to actually perform realtime mapping at any cost.
Yes, this is good news for detecting and treating illness in underserved communities. Another advancement could be a method to detect cataracts on a smartphone. Cataracts are said to be the number one preventable cause of blindness worldwide, but the condition is not always detected in time, particularly in developing nations.
All in all, smartphones and technology are ever so present in our lives, it is ok to merge our lifestyles with tools to support our success. Sometimes in order to get back on track to wellness, we need an accountability partner, so our smartphone is that new partner! Very simple, but powerful and always accessible.
I also agree with you. I bet millions of people in remote rural areas would agree to disclose their health information with the rest of the world if only it could help to save their lives.
@Asish: You're right about the privacy concern, but there's a trade-off involved here. If people are getting better diagnosis and medical treatment via this system, they would not mind sharing their data with the health workers. In this case it's a win-win situation for both the parties.
Thanks for this informative piece, Vineeta. As I observed earlier this year on Internet Evolution, tablets, too, are paving the way for a greater presence and application of mobile technology in the healthcare sector, including therapeutic purposes.
Special medical tablets have even been invented specifically for health monitoring (such as the Athena programmer, which helps doctors remotely monitor and manage the symptoms of patients with Parkinson's Disease).
Great points, Modza. My only concern about the lack of 100 percent accuracy of medical tests is the possibility that dire conditions will test out negative. In other words, if a condition is detected at any level by an application, that at least screens out the sick from the well. But if a condition goes undetected at all by a test, well, that sort of obviates the value of the test.
Surely a little medical care is better than none. But I agree as well that other resources, like clean water, must be addressed first, or at least in tandem with this kind of medical innovation.
Interesting about DNA testing. Perhaps it doesn't really address the needs of the populations it's meant to serve?
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The sleepy Indian town of Antarvedipalem is located about 15 kilometers from the confluence of the Bay of Bengal and the delta of the mighty Godavari River. It is in the East Godavari district, the poor cousin to the West Godavari district, wealthy in verdant wetland, but deprived of connectedness.
India is a country where book sales and numbers of publishing houses continue to grow, and not merely among the English-reading elite of nearly 11 million.
Many aspiring artistes with conventional jobs in India share a passion for music, a product of Brahmanical upbringing that focuses on development of classical music and dance skills along with one’s profession.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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