Big data gets physical | Science | theguardian.com

Smartphone app visualises two similar running routes

I am obsessed with my running app. Last week obsession became frustration verging on throw-the-phone-on-the-floor anger. Wednesday’s lunchtime 5km run was pretty good, almost back up to pre-Christmas pace. On Friday, I thought I had smashed it. The first 2km were very close to my perennial 5 min/km barrier. And I was pretty sure I had kept up the pace. But the app disagreed.

As I ate my 347 calorie salad – simultaneously musing on how French dressing could make up 144 of them – I switched furiously between the two running route analyses. This was just preposterous; the GPS signal must have been confused; I must have been held up overtaking that tourist group for longer than I realised; or perhaps the app is just useless and all previous improvements in pace were bogus.

My desire to count stuff is easy to poke fun at. It’s probably pretty unhealthy too. But it’s only going to be encouraged over the next few years. Wearable technology is here to stay. Smart phone cameras are also heart rate monitors. Contact lenses can measures blood sugar. And teddy bears take your temperature. A 2011 market assessment, estimated that there will be 80m sports, fitness and “wellness” wearable devices by 2016.

At the moment, it’s difficult to retrieve the data these systems collect. Nike only allow software developers access to data produced by people like me so they can create new features for their apps. I cannot go back and interrogate my own data.

Harbouring user data for product development is an extension of part of the search engine or mobile provider business model. When you log in to Gmail while browsing the internet, you give Google data about your individual search behaviour in exchange for more personalised results. Less obviously, when you use the browser on your phone, mobile companies collect (and sell) valuable data about what you are looking for and where you are. The latest iteration of this model is Weve, providing access to data about EE, O2 and Vodafone customers in the UK.

After Friday lunchtime’s outburst, I accepted that I’d never find the cause of my wayward run and quickly got absorbed back into the working day.

But I shouldn’t have.

We talk about the economic and social value of opening up government data about crime numbers or hospital waiting times. But what about the data we’re collecting about our daily lives? This is not just a resource for running geeks to obsess over, it provides otherwise unrecorded details of our daily lives. Sharing data about health has the potential to be an act of generosity and contribution to the public good.

For some areas of healthcare, particularly for type 2 diabetics or those with complex cardiovascular conditions, lifestyle information could make a huge difference to how we understand and treat patients. It could provide the kind of evidence badly needed to make headway in areas where clinical trials aren’t enough.

But it’s not yet easy to make something of this broader value created by fitness apps or soft toys with sensors in them. One person’s data is saved in different ways through different services – making for a messy, distributed dataset.

There is also no clear way to incorporate this into the current healthcare system. Some companies have made strides in that direction. Proteus Digital Health offers a system for monitoring a patient’s medication and physical activity using an iPad app and ingestible pills. This takes some much needed steps towards understanding how people comply with their prescription. At the moment, only 50% of patients suffering from chronic diseases follow their recommended treatment. If Proteus starts to sell information back to the health service, it will take digital health into mainstream healthcare. However,it hasn’t reached that point yet. And it is still a rare example of a company with the regulatory approval to do so. For example, Neurosky’s portable EEG machines, which measure brain activity, make excellent toys. But the company has no intention of certifying its products as medical equipment, given the time and expense it requires.

But does that matter? Neurosky’s wizard-training game Focus Pocus improves a player’s cognitive abilities including memory recall, impulse control, and the ability to concentrate. Some US medical practitioners are now prescribing Focus Pocus. This makes biofeedback therapy to ADHD patients available at home, replacing two to three hospital visits a week. This is going on anyway – outside the mainstream healthcare system.

Some see this as an opportunity to mobilise a peer-to-peer health knowledge commons outside the healthcare system that is filtered through government, hospitals and GPs’ surgeries. This new healthcare system would exist out among the public. Pioneered by Tedmed’s clinical editor, Wellthcare tries to pinpoint the new kind of value that this people-powered healthcare system would create. “Wellth” is closer to the idea of wellbeing or wellness than health; it is about supporting “what people want to do, supported by their nano-networks”. There is the potential for a future where we move from producers of data that is sucked up by companies into producers of data who consciously share it with one another, learn to interpret it and make judgments from it ourselves.

The current healthcare system may evolve to support this kind of change. In the UK, Academic Health Science Networks and Clinical Commissioning Groups provide new structures within the NHS that have the potential to support disruptive innovations. But so far these have led to small, incremental changes. A healthcare system that uses data we collect about ourselves would require these new bodies to make much bigger choices about how NHS trusts procure products and services.

Going back to the ever expanding market for wearable technology – with a potential patient group of 80m, there should be a lot more going on to turn our physiological data in the treasure trove it could be. Forget supermarket reward points and website hits, the really big data only just arrived.

See original article here – 

Big data gets physical | Science | theguardian.com