Enabling Individual Wellness through Computational Systems Biology, Cloud Analytics, Wearables, Machine Learning and More
Riaan Conradie LifeQ
The future will be a world of increasing abundance, where the individual’s need for holistic wellbeing will be optimized for on the fly, and at a systems level. Systems at all hierarchical levels (such as personalized physiologies, societies, economies, and ecologies) will be simultaneously considered.
This will be realized because agents (whether large corporations, startups, individuals and later predominately algorithms) will self-organize and collaborate around an individual’s de-identified and distributed data, acquired from thousands of data input streams (IoT and on, in and remote body monitors). The resulting information will be diffused into our environments in a seamless, invisible and need optimizing way. In so doing, an individual’s holistic wellbeing will be solved for in a more intelligent way, making us inherently less reactive to our immediate wants and fears. Unlike the current paradigm, this will happen because of, not despite a world that is more connected, and where technology is more ubiquitous and working day and night behind the scenes. It is noteworthy to point out that this world will be increasingly user driven (and vendors will be user managed), in contrast to the more customer relationship management world of today.
Exponential technology growth, data transparency on a systems level, and an increasingly connected world, will bring this world of abundance [1], as proclaimed by Peter Diamandis and others, to us much sooner than we anticipate, given we not only focus on technology innovation, but also carefully consider our worldly ‘burn rate’ and suggested remaining runway/resource (several doomsday scenarios have been suggested [2]) and apply the required business innovation. This sheds light on the initiatives of entrepreneurs, like Elon Musk, who are focusing on capturing energy from external sources, building a distributed and dynamic energy storage platform, and preparing to colonize other worlds.
This talk will touch on this future, and what technologies have been developed, are currently being developed, and will have to be developed, as a substrate out of which this world will emerge.
While only a part of overall human wellness, this talk will discuss how an integrative technology (combining wearable devices, a needs based wearable device management, mobile devices, applications, cloud based algorithm runtimes, APIs and a de-identification and collaboration protocol) and science and analytics approach (systems biology modeling and analytics, behavioral science, machine learning and other statistical methods) have been combined, to not only promote disease prevention by understand personalized continuous data streams (behavioral, physiological, and environmental) and figure out how to drive individual behavior change towards healthier people, but to reduce the overall cost burden the healthcare system is facing.
This integrative partnership approach is geared towards enabling a range of different players in the user driven digital health ecosystem, for example: (i) it allows individuals to share their health state with insurers, if they want to, in order to get reduced pricing for a better lifestyle, and (ii) it allows wearable device companies to implement wearable device management systems that learns about the individual’s physiology in the cloud, as well as their specific downstream product needs, and tailor the embedded firmware on a wearable device in order to minimize user friction, while getting the required information to get these solutions functioning properly, and (iii) it allows user engagement specialists to deliver corporate wellness programs that delivers better health and wellness outcomes by including high efficacy information about an individual’s sleep architecture, real time acute stress readings, etc.
Riaan will conclude the talk by sharing a personal story of how this more considered approach significantly improved his own health and overall wellness, and how we should approach needs-based technology development towards building this future of abundance.
[1] A great TED talk by Peter Diamandis on Abundance: https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_diamandis_abundance_is_our_future
[2] Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J. and Behrens, W.W. (1972) “The limits to Growth – 1st Report of the Club of Rome.” Universe Books, New York, MY, USA. ISBN 0-87663-165-0.