NSL Blog

Big data and the sentient world

April 7, 2013

Chapter 5 of No Straight Lines addresses this emerging issue of data. The reason is that the fastest data set revolution is being created by you, every time we text search travel buy we add to the data mountain some 2.5 billion gigabytes a day we, that’s all of humanity are collectively writing a new consciousness into existence. In fact the architecture of our own brain suggests the future of sentience may reside in a different kind of BIG. The question is how do we make meaning out of this data? How can data help us meet the challenges in our daily lives, challenges for our cities, for our changing climate, the ever increasing demand to better manage the resources we have? The last 4 billion years are nothing compared to what lies ahead for us as a humanity. This is the world of BIG DATA that is going to have implications for us there is an explosion of information, complexity, diversity, sentience, beauty and structure that is changing our source code. This BIG intelligence is making our world more sentient and enables us to organize more complex types of intelligence. At an atomic level data creates a new eco-system that enlarges the opportunity for humanity. Data will provide us with the capacity to recreate our world, and without it some argue we are increasingly going to feel naked.

Your destiny with data: From an individual perspective, we leave continuous trails of data, plumes of bits of information. It’s the personal exhaust from our digital interactions. These are the shadows and messy footprints of our daily lives. In the highly competitive world of marketing and commerce, this data is being recognised as increasingly important, with companies desperate to harvest, aggregate and refine it for commercial gain. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, published a paper in which his research found that the peaks and troughs of Google searches would be predictive in the demand for certain goods and services. Scary or not so scary it depends.

Smart cities: Data will become increasingly a part of the interface of our world. Machine to Machine data with increase 22-fold between 2011 and 2016. This means for example drawing deeper insights from smarter cities allowing us to improve: transportation, public safety, energy, healthcare, refining the quality of peoples everyday life. People buildings and its infrastructure become more intimately engaged with each other. Something that Rio is experimenting with at this very moment, with is called intelligent dynamic data that is interconnecting the cities data sets and flows. In Los Angeles the police department has been using BIG DATA to predict crime before it happens and consequently alter their patterns of policing as a consequence – very Minority Report and the practice of pre-crime. Researchers in Japan have proposed using data from vehicles’ windscreen wipers and embedded GPS receivers to track the movement of weather systems through towns and cities with a precision never before possible.

Climate change: Recent climate change models predict an increase in extreme weather events. Governments and NGOs around the world face mounting pressure to provide disaster relief to many vulnerable communities. Events in the USA, like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, have shown that emergency services don’t have the capacity to reach everyone in need. In developing countries like Haiti the situation is even more desperate. How can mobile network technology and social networking help isolated people?

Since the Haiti earthquake, advances have been made. United Nations Disaster 2.0 paper reports: “On the timeline of the Internet’s evolution, the 2010 Haiti earthquake response will be remembered as the moment when the level of access to mobile and online communication enabled a kind of collective intelligence to emerge”. More worryingly, the report says “the humanitarian system had no formal protocols for communicating with these volunteer and technical communities”. It means we can dissolve complexity and chaos via peer to peer networks mobile communications and data.

From consumption of healthcare to the practice of wellness: In Participatory Health: Online and Mobile Tools Help Chronically Ill Manage Their Care, one of the observations made was that patients seek ongoing conversations with their doctors; the report states:

Beyond merely searching for health information is patient ‘engagement’ with such information and its sources, both online and elsewhere. The Edelman Health Engagement Barometer, launched in October 2008, identified about 22% of American adults as ‘health info-entials’ – that is, people who most actively seek health information and discourse and want to be able to talk about their health needs with others. What motivates these people toward those parties with whom they seek health engagement is trust, authenticity, and satisfaction. And among all sources of information and contact, health information seekers expect ‘conversations with my doctor’ to be the most important connector for health engagement.

The Pew Project found an even stronger correlation between mobile platforms and the use of the internet to seek health information: 89% of people with wireless internet connections seek health information online, compared to only 40% of consumers who use only a wired internet connection. A difference may also be found in the quality of the interactions: According to Fox, writing in ‘The Social Life of Health’ information: ‘E-patients with mobile access to the internet are more likely than those who have tethered access to contribute their comments and reviews to the online conversation.’ This behaviour was also identified in The Mobile Difference, where the Pew Project reported that wireless access is associated with deeper engagement and participation in online communications. It is  predicted that Mobile health services would shave $400bn (£265m) off the OECD countries’ annual healthcare bill by 2017

We need eHealth developments that are improving the right of access to quality healthcare regardless of personal condition and geographical location, allowing the selection of the appropriate health resource from anywhere at any time.  So what might be the benefits of using a mobile device for health services?

• It’s a completely personal device.
• It facilitates highly personal health services.
• It can help ensure the fidelity of patients.
• It’s always turned on and carried or within arms’ reach.
• It facilitates wireless body area networks.
• It facilitates the gathering of contextual information.
• It ensures it’s there in unexpected emergency scenarios.
• It provides assurance that care is at hand.
• It facilitates push services as well as pull.

For example, mobile enabled services allow people to create and maintain medical histories on their phones. All the allergies, current medications, past treatments and names of doctors and hospitals are now in one place. For those with complicated medical histories, this could be no less than a life-saving service. We are starting to see a range of services made available via mobile platforms, which enables the collection, storage and analysis of wellness-related data, collected from everyday life. Remote diagnostics and patient management technologies in telemedicine have been highlighted as being one of the key components of healthcare for the 21st century.

Further reading / listening

• Ushahidi: a story of non-linear innovation
• Innovating in crisis management
• Interview 28minute listen
• Introduction to the Mobile Society
• Designing for Transformation