The Pivot of Quantified Health into Modern Medicine

A conversation with Kevin Patrick, Professor, Family and Preventive Medicine (UCSD), Adjunct Professor of Public Health (San Diego State University), and Editor-in-Chief, American Journal of Preventive Medicine; hosted by Larry Smarr, Director, Calit2, a UC San Diego/Irvine Partnership (HQ Qualcomm Institute), UCSD

Kevin Patrick: Created center for wireless and information health. Able to put systems approaches into medicine at both individual and population levels.

• Interventions focus on weaving text messages, apps, Facebook together
• Thousands of people are out there building these kinds of fitness, diet, health apps
• 20% of people are using some form of tech to monitor a health behavior
• Obesity study: Interventions for young people, designed by young people. One of seven studies.
  • Trying to correlate Facebook apps with obesity research, which typically affects people between age 20 and 40.
  • Couldn’t have predicted the volume of Facebook and Twitter users when they started their research.
• The Exposome is accumulated effect of everything we’re exposed to over a lifetime
  • Air quality: CitiSense is measuring San Diego air quality through personal sensors.  EPA sensors are vastly different from more personal sensor data, which can be offered up to communities
  • Fully half of premature morbidity is still to be determined. These sensors can give us a better sense of the other half.
• Want to develop a platform open to developers; partnering with Qualcomm and Kinect
  • Goal: Ecosystem of developers working on all corners of health apps
• Health Data Project
  • Just approved funding for a planning grant
  • More and more health data is being found outside of medical records
  • Exploring the idea of a data commons

Larry Smarr: Consumers have driven the change here rather than the industry from the inside out.

• Companies all have data dashboards to ensure things are running smoothly. Where’s your personal health dashboard?