Sastry Nanduri on Hacking 4 Health
Alexandra Carmichael
December 26, 2010
This is a guest post by Sastry Nanduri, co-founder of one of our annual sponsors, HealthTap. Please comment below if you’d like to be part of the “personal data hackathon” Sastry is suggesting:
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HealthTap is an avid supporter and sponsor of Quantified Self. We share Quantified Self’s belief that quantification and measurement can lead to insightful learning and impactful improvement. HealthTap’s vision is based on exactly this philosophy. Our mission is to improve people’s health by helping them make better health decisions using data. We are working to unleash the power of data – facts and numbers – to make it personal, and use it to help bring about measurable improvements to people’s health and well-being.
I have been a regular attendee of Quantified Self meetings and am amazed at how much the movement and group is growing month over month. The quantification that the members are doing is resulting in large amounts of intriguing data, much of which has never been collected before, or analyzed in as thoughtful a way as Quantified Selfers are doing. This leads to an important question: how can we unlock the power of this data?
In this talk at the Bay Area Quantified Self Show&Tell meetup group (below), I share the details of a Hackathon HealthTap hosted with the specific goal of providing structure to, building a community around, and unleashing the power of government health data by leveraging the creativity and passion of a developer network. On a single Saturday, over 200 developers gathered at our office in Palo Alto, brainstormed, collaborated with each other and developed 18 different projects that mashed the government data in interesting and useful ways.
I would love to facilitate a similar gathering and effort with the data being generated by Quantified Self members. I believe an event focused on turning the wealth of quantified data into actionable insights will be extremely valuable and intriguingly insightful. If the purpose of quantification is to learn and improve, we’ve got an amazing opportunity to create a stunning opportunity to exponentially improve these efforts by bringing together, sharing, and working with our collective data sets. If you’re interested in supporting this effort, have ideas on how to make it beneficial for all, or are interesting in helping bring it together, please email me with your thoughts at sastry.nanduri@healthtap.com.
