I wrote a guest post for the Health Data Consortium — here’s the start of it: This year marks the 25th anniversary of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal to create what we now call the Web, the visual, hypertext organizing system which overlays the internet. The pace of internet adoption gathered speed once people could more intuitively […]
Quantified Self
Big (really big) data comes to health care
In December 2013, Kira Peikoff wrote about how, when she had her DNA tested by three direct-to-consumer companies, the results were all over the place. She interviewed experts to get their advice: J. Craig Venter, chief executive of his namesake institute and of Synthetic Genomics, was a pioneer in sequencing the human genome in 2000. Though […]
Health Datapalooza IV
I will be part of a panel on self-tracking at the Health Datapalooza in Washington, DC, on Tuesday. My fellow panelists include Naveen Selvadurai, a co-founder of Foursquare; Roger Magoulas, the director of market research at O’Reilly Media; Jodi Daniel, director of the Office of Policy and Planning at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology; and Abdul Shaikh of National Cancer Institute’s Health Communication and […]
Big data, red flags, better health?
A new interview with Stephen Wolfram on “why he thinks your life should be measured, analyzed, and improved” popped up on the same day that American Medical News ran a story advising clinicians to look for “red flags” like unfilled prescriptions and delayed screenings since it may mean the patient has lost their job or […]
How do self-trackers handle loved ones who aren’t self-trackers?
— intriguing question raised by Emily Kramer-Golinkoff on Twitter. I’d love to hear if people have experiences or advice to share in the comments. I wonder if the answer depends on how visible someone’s tracking is or whether they share their activity with their loved ones. If you are new to the idea of self-tracking, […]
Tracking for Health: Detailed Demographics
In response to popular demand, my Pew Research colleagues and I posted detailed demographic tables for the “Tracking for Health” study. I should warn you: These are not pretty tables. You may need a ruler to keep track of the rows and columns since we crammed as much data into each table as possible. But […]
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