Daniel Nofal:Three years ago, my father and otherwise healthy 64 year old man contracted a rare blood cancer that ended his life 13 months later. This opened my eyes to the current state of health knowledge. Our knowledge of health is very limited. We have advanced incredibly in treating disease but genetics, lifestyle, all of that has to come together for us to really understand health.
We don’t know why we get ill. This is a burning question inside of me. Why did my father get ill and why do we all get ill? This question is still unanswered. I don’t think researchers have adequate information to do that.
The health information that researchers have is fragmented and it lacks scale, and the health information the public has is bias and unreliable. We need a Wikipedia of crowdsource health information. I believe that the Quantified Self is gathering information that maybe the key to understanding health, but in order for this to happen we need to be able to share it more broadly and in a better way.
QS is focused mostly in the individual, but what is learnt by one individual is lost with it. So we need to find something that brings social benefit to the whole of society and the whole of humanity with this information, that’s why two years ago we founded Wiklife. It’s a non-profit that aims to gather all the information available into one place for researchers to access in open data, and open API, and open source way. This foundation will unite all this information for every researcher and everybody to look at it and understand it.
We’ve also developed an iPhone app that can track nutrition, drugs, symptoms, activities, mood. This app is in the app store right now and it can be used, and it has been used for hundreds of users right now.
We have a team of developers, physicians, designers and scientists working on it, and generating huge databases of all the assets that affect health and this team is committed to achieving in reaching this goal. We are also gathering information through social networks. A tweet becomes a log, and we have recently surpassed the one million log mark by gathering information through the Twitter capabilities of most devices and apps.
Then there’s also the illusive electronic medical records that is finally becoming real, and we are getting ready for it. We already can log most lab tests and hospital procedures right now, and in the future this can be directly uploaded to Wikilife.
The individuals can find correlations between their health variables, but also have a context of information which they can compare it with. This brings a lot more power to our information.
The genomic revolutions to achieve its goal needs lifestyle information, with enough scale Wikilife could be a great tool to told to how DNA works in real life. So I ask developers and app manufacturers to unlock the power of this information for the benefit of the whole of humanity.
And our entity can talk to you to help you integrate your information with us. So this example of gather on Twitter and just in a month we gathered 200,000 logs of information, and this information is kept. So when a user logs into Wikilife we’ll have historic information for them right there with nothing from their part.
Not surprisingly running is the main activity that we have logged. Walking and cycling is also quite high, and the average running time of 42 minutes did surprised me, but I’m not big on running.
The main health complaint from our limited beta tester database shows that headaches is quite high, also neck pain and backache are quite high. And I think they all need a little more yoga or aspirin or maybe both. I’ve been tracking myself for over a year with this tool and I’ve learnt that if I do Aikido in the morning my mood improves by 20%, and this is very consistent so now I do it every day.
If all the Quantified Self community can unite to approach it like Wikilife, we can generate an enormous social, scientific, and economic impact. So I ask you to come to talk to us so we can understand health together.
Thank you.
