My former colleagues at the Pew Research Center continue to publish the best research on the impact of the internet on American society, bar none. My fandom extends to creating a fact sheet summarizing their recent surveys about Americans’ data worries. The results are indications about what people think and feel about the shifting technology […]
Tracking for Health
What’s your advice?
My dad was a survivor — of a heart attack in his 50s, kidney cancer in his 60s, and an initial diagnosis of melanoma in his 70s. Melanoma recurrence and complications of treatment are what finally got him. A lifelong runner, Dad kept meticulous notes about his mileage and heart rate on paper. He bought […]
The Rise of the New Bio-citizen
Over the next two days, I’ll be part of a group convened by Eleonore Pauwels and Todd Kuiken to discuss barriers to citizen-driven biomedical research. If you are intrigued, read the report, “The Rise of the New Bio-citizen,” which lays out how people “are pursuing a range of activities from analyses of genomic data for […]
Data for health
Last week I was part of the first community meeting for Data for Health, a program sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It was held in Philadelphia on October 30 (an absolutely beautiful fall day). You can catch up on the #data4health tweets thanks to Symplur — and there were some good ones: Some themes of #Data4Health: […]
We are at the beginning of a revolution…
I see parallels between the current state of health data tracking and the trajectory of adoption we saw in the early days of internet, broadband, and mobile adoption. Here’s a clip I just found from an interview with WHYY’s Dan Gottlieb in which I explain what I mean by that: [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/103245026″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” […]
Who is ready to stand naked in front of the mirror of data?
In this talk at the Quantified Self Public Health symposium, I argue that we must respect the context of people’s lives while designing health interventions, tools, and research projects. Not everyone is ready to stand naked in front of the bright light of numbers on a screen. Let’s be gentle in our approach, especially to […]
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