Archive for May 3rd, 2010
The Quantified Self in Healthcare
May 3, 2010
In the New York Times Sunday Magazine, an article by a Wired editor, talks about the growing trend of the Quantified Self, or the data driven life. Why is this becoming a real trend? “Four things changed.
- electronic sensors got smaller and better.
- people started carrying powerful computing devices, typically disguised as mobile phones.
- social media made it seem normal to share everything.
- we began to get an inkling of the rise of a global superintelligence known as the cloud.”
While more people are creating catalogs of various aspects of their lives, some specific healthcare examples are cited including Medhelp.org “where more than 30,000 new personal tracking projects are started by users every month” and CureTogether.
Also, in FastCompany, an article title Our Bodies, Our Quantified Selves, they note that “there may actually be some meaningful upsides to this radical transparency.” Particularly the opportunity for medical research on this exponentially growing volume of data.
To me, this is the obvious next big thing in health care. The only question is how to channel the energy of this new trend into meaningful information for the individual and society.
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