Your body generated millions of data points every day and this video illustrates why and what can be done with these data.

Today, heart bear data can be interpreted as normal or abnormal. Other aspects of our health are a lot less clear cut. Sleep patterns for example are difficult to evaluate beyond a very basic understanding. Once enough data is collected though, a not only better, but personalized, benchmarks will be available to give us clues and alerts to allow us to adjust our behaviors to lead healthier lives. This, in much more efficient ways than the hit or miss approach of modern medicine.

Take a look below and let me know what this inspires you.

The best rebuttal of privacy concerns as they relate to insurance companies using this data to adjust rates or insurability is from Google co-founder Larry Page and in the tweet after the video.

Health records privacy: “worried health insurance denial? Makes no sense. Insurance rules should be changed to allow every1″ -Larry Page #io

— Yacine Baroudi (@YacineBaroudi) May 17, 2013

The post Why Capture The Data Our Bodies Generate? appeared first on Yacine Baroudi.

Click this link to download a copy of this resume

The post Resume 2013 appeared first on Yacine Baroudi.

Linkedin launches hashtags and as usual has jumps the gun on Facebook, confident in its position in the digital landscape. A no non-sense approach to making its social networks practical and in touch with the ever growing needs and demands of always on users.
The addition of a #hashtag feature works exactly in the same way it does on Twitter and is not all altruistic. Facebook has also announced its own hashtags to be on their way. It is a great way to open new advertising modes and services. Trending on a Twitter hashtag is one of the holy grails of social media.

The adoption of hashtags by major social networks is also a response to three compounding factors: their use by major advertisers, consumers and the need to provide ways to sift through mountains of social chatter and quickly cut through the clutter. Take a look at the video below for a quick overview.

#Hashtags have long been in existence in the Twitter world. See how they already were allowing Twitter 1,000,000 words for 140 characters back in 2011 (a century ago in digital terms). If you’re not familiar with #hashtags or havent been using them, it’s time to remedy to that. In a world where data produced is exploding, where most communications are digital and where your counterparts’ attention span is melting like snow in the sun, here are a few personal advantages to using Linkedin hashtags:

• Express only the most important in your message / post / update and leave the context and details to be illustrated by the hashtag
• Demonstrate that you are in the know by using the most relevant hashtag. Do your home work first.
• Deliver value in what you say or share, showing your audience that you are conscious of their time… and minuscule attention spans
• Get noticed by using a specific hashtag and embark on the stream of people interested in particular subject
• Create your own and use it as a way to brand yourself, your product or service

If you’ve been using #hashtags what other advantages have you seen of them? Let me know  in the comment section below.

If you haven’t, try it and you’ll see how handy they are and how quickly you may get addicted to them. Even using them in places where they wont link anywhere, like in good old emails. Some words don’t need link anywhere else to illustrate a #context, a #position or a #sentiment.

#exciting!< click it to see how people are using it. An excellent way to dive right in. As for the original Digital Health post in Linkedin, just click.

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Today I ran in this interview by Robert Scoble of Tejho Kote. He’s the CEO and co-founder of a startup that has seemingly nothing to do with healthcare. The company is called Automatic and it is focused on bettering our experience as car owners. This, via a mobile app and a small device that plugs into the vehicle. And this idea feels eerily similar to the story of the health revolution through technology.

There are still a lot of skeptics on the extent to which technology may help revolutionize healthcare. This has in my view, largely to do with the perceived novelty of the concept:

— What do you mean we will need less of physicians’ time?
— What do you mean patients can take more ownership of their own health?
— What do you mean, we can confidently integrate and measure soft parameters in treatment paradigms?

The truth is, all technology and social media promise to do to healthcare, is enable behavioral change. Not wave a magic wand, that quickly makes the idea much more palatable and the analogy of Automatic is a great one to illustrate the rationale. All the while earmarking an industry to potentially learn and translate ideas from. As Tejho Kote puts it himself about his concept: “There are a lot of off the market products similar to Automatic. It’s just that they’ve always been the hobbyist or the enthusiastic type of products (3:40)… We think of it as a consumer product that any car owner can use.” 

He also makes a great point in answering, Robert Scoble’s question about risks of his system to cars warranty. The idea fills a gap created by the difficulty of the automotive industry to integrate innovation fast enough and allows to jump over those very hurdles. Can you guess what Automatic’s exit strategy might be? Through the use of its mobile app and an information relaying device, Automatic promises to do 4 things that I believe any car owner will be very enthusiastic about:

1. Car usage and money saving tips
2. Alerts and what they mean
3. Parking location
4. Crash detection

But let’s just stay on a simple version: “real-time diagnostics and prompts to save up to 30% in gas”.

Read that again: “real-time diagnostics and prompts to save up to 30% in gas“, now let’s take that same sentence and translate it to a health-related situation: real-time diagnostics and prompts ____________. The blanks can be filled with any number of statements:

• To keep your high blood pressure stable
• About which foods, based on your weight and diet of the day, to eat and which ones to avoid and in what quantity, to keep your blood glucose in check that day
• About why going to bed 45 minutes earlier today would be a good idea, since your energy levels have been low this week.

All these things are already very doable by anybody for their health, even if the human body has mechanics that a lot more complicated than a car has. But that very complexity, and the human factor, makes it so that it’s so far only been possible for people that are either very motivated, very strong willed or, some will say, for those who have lots of time on their hands.

69% of U.S. adults track a health indicator like weight, diet, exercise
routine, or symptom. Of those, half track “in their heads,” one-third keep
notes on paper, and one in five use technology to keep tabs on their health
status. Pew Research Center January 2013

But other than for a small proportion, how efficient do you think the mind tracking or even the paper based one is?

No, the idea of Digital Health or mHealth, is not even close to being new. As tech nut as I am, technology is not the answer but only part of it. It’s only an enabler of the answer. There are also issues such as education, data privacy and data systems interoperability that must be addressed in order for technology to really enable the healthcare revolution; just as many opportunities to innovate and build businesses.

When it comes to health and technology though, many are today acting as the Luddites, these 19th-century English textile artisans who destroyed the newly-developed, labour-saving machinery in the early 1800s, because it was affecting their livelihood. Let’s pause on a couple of related questions for good measure then:

• Will mechanics’ livelihood be affected by the Automatic solution or will it enable a better relationship and experience for their clients?
• Will the power shift over to patients, driven by easier information access AND technology, put health providers out of business or will it mandate the design and establishment of new and better experiences in caring for health?

What do you think?

Take a look at the Scoble interview below and the Automatic website. Do you think the analogy is far fetched or is there a bunch we could learn? Since the healthcare industry seems even more behind the times.

The post Why Digital Health is Nowhere Near a New Idea appeared first on Yacine Baroudi.

Digital health, mhealth, health IT are all the buzz these days and regardless of the angle you look at it, the technology revolution and social media are two compounding phenomenons that could contribute to greatly improving healthcare delivery, management and resulting outcomes. As a data buff and healthcare marketer, I am very excited about it. But why is it that technology and social media could revolutionize health care?

One short answer could be: holistic health care. Or, to sound more hip we could call it: “total health care”.

Holistic health is a concept in medical practice, upholding that all aspects of people’s needs including psychological, physical and social should be taken into account and seen as a whole.

Source: Wikipedia

The Usual Suspects

Technology is the medium through which data is collected and social channels are smoothing people’s attitudes towards initially generating data about themselves and ultimately towards being in a continuous state of automatic data generation. The latter being the goal to at the same strengthen the validity of the cause-effect theories and free the health care actors to monitor progress, interpret results and adjust the necessary course of action towards a total, more efficient, holistic health outcome.

More specifically, the leverage of technology and social channels opens the possibility of completing and obtaining a more holistic picture about a sufferer and her pathology, at the individual level. Thus, allowing the understanding and possible official inclusion in main stream treatment paradigms, of the “softer elements” of holistic health.

Although the concept of holistic health is widely accepted in medicine, it is also subject to criticism as nothing more than placebo effect, that can even be dangerous if used as a a replacement instead of an add-on to conventional therapy.

Health and Data

Health management at it most basic level is data management. An authority prescribes, a sufferer executes, based on resulting data (measure or inquiry) the prescriber decides on next steps. Rinse and repeat this cycle until the condition is stabilized or breaks again. A more holistic approach could make for these iterations to be more fruitful and their outcomes more long lasting. But at any level of the healthcare pyramid today, the burden of proof for the softer elements of holistic health to be legit, lies mainly in the difficulty that exist in collecting related data, proving a correlation and measuring an impact. That’s why I call them here “softer”. This lack hampers our ability to generate reliable cause-effect theories, that can confidently be recommended by prescribers and applied by sufferers.

Technology and the use of social channels, are both encouraging the concepts of self-tracking, quantified-self and individualized medicine. More data generated faster at the individual level, will result in even more data at the aggregate level. Thus allowing a better understanding of the causes, resulting effects and how those vary by specific situation. This understanding is likely to legitimize and make available more treatment options both conventional, “soft” and many flavors in between. And the more data-backed, legit options there are the more possible alternatives for sufferers to try, precisely measure and tweak as appropriate. The more opportunities for professionals to continuously learn and better their craft.

More Doctors Starting To Prescribe Mobile Apps for Chronic Conditions
Read more…

Data Unite!

The ability to measure and tweak means sufferers can engage more easily in the prescription and management of their own care. This also could mean a lesser control by professionals — depending on their willingness to monitor patients data feeds — but also a lesser need for their time… and expense.

In the same way that technology will legitimize some “soft elements”, and confirm others as mere placebo, it will also raise the bar on the burden of proof for the “hard elements” of conventional medecine and the science that underlies it.

My excitement about this equation lies precisely at the intersection of the wave of disruption and the one opportunity that are still traveling towards each other but the ripple of which have already started to touch.

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A good friend of mine recently asked me for guidance on starting on Twitter. May sound strange but yes, there are still people who aren’t on Twitter. It is definitely a matter of fact we tend to forget.

If and once she gets on Twitter, I will definitely make sure to shadow and guide her but I did not want to overwhelm her with jargon and explanations that are better delivered in a hands-on setting rather than a theoretical one. This little exercise also unearthed an excellent infographic by Roba Al-Assi | @RobaAssi that I had shared back in 2010. It is still very much relevant and further backed by the amount of traffic the article still gets even after 3 years.

I thought the little cheat could be of value to some people and here it is exactly as shared minus a couple of personally identifiable items.

Quote

1. Sign up and make sure your profile is complete
2. Follow the steps that will make you follow some people, mainly celebrities. Connect your address book to see whom of your friends are already on Twitter. Look me up and say hi!
3. Start searching for subjects that matter to you
4. Explore and share (retweet or post) some of the stuff you find
5. [Listen for answer/replies] Thank people for any replies, retweets or follows you may have gotten
6. Emit a few opinions on subjects you have at heart
7. [Listen for answer/replies] Thank people for any replies, retweets or follows you may have gotten
8. Compliment some people on articles they share or tweets they sent
9. [Listen for answer/replies] Thank people for any replies, retweets or follows you may have gotten
10. Disagree with some others
11. [Listen for answer/replies] Thank people for any replies, retweets or follows you may have gotten
12. Share some personal stuff to be assess you’re human and willing to connect
13. [Listen for answer/replies] Thank people for any replies, retweets or follows you may have gotten
14. Engage in conversations but don’t be a “troll”
15. [Listen for answer/replies] Thank people for any replies, retweets or follows you may have gotten

If you can integrate these steps in your daily digital routine you’ll be well on your way. You may at some points get bored and feel like giving up, DON’T. In a few weeks you’ll be glad you didnt take a look at the attached piece for motivation in the meantime although from 2010, it is still very much valid

Have fun and let me know (on Twitter @YacineBaroudi) if you have questions.

Unquote

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Generation Y will represent 75% of the work U.S. workforce by 2025. This age group  is fascinating to observe in how they relate to the world surrounding them. Particularly when we overlaying onto it what’s happening in their mind. Sometime dark sometimes uplifting, you can’t help but gaze and wonder what the world might be like once they really take over the world.

What other sentiments do these slides evoke?

Take a look at this presentation through a marketer lens, what challenges do you see in convincing the next buying-power age group?

The post Trip Inside a Gen Y Mind appeared first on Yacine Baroudi.

When it comes to the coming data explosion, the wholly grail resides not in collecting data, not in storing it but in actually using and harnessing it to extract its value. There are two variables that will command data harnessing: algorithms complexity and processing power.

A recent Twitter connection, and not of the least engaging ones, by the name of Teri Conrad aka @TeriConrad, picked my late night muse with a sentence on Twitter such that it necessitates more than 140 characters. The sentence was:

@yacinebaroudi now I’d be curious how we can start measuring things that actually matter like overall sentiment etc…

— Teri Conrad(@TeriConrad) March 17, 2013

The conversation was initiated around a 1962 write up predicting today’s Big Data phenomenon, and that had recently been released by the CIA.

What I meant by my answer to Teri, was that the insights and sentiment analysis she’s seeking will eventually arrive by way of either being able to better correlate data or by way of being able to processing larger amounts of it.

@yacinebaroudi imminent I suppose but tough to gather.. Data is fine but insights are better

— Teri Conrad(@TeriConrad) March 17, 2013

It is a bit like today’s mobile devices. For several data collection applications, such as maintaining a continuous GPS track and simultaneously checking that data against a locations database, are inadequate for a very simple reason: battery life. We could to a certain extent equate battery life to the Teri’s insights. There are two ways to solve this problem and allow for more sophisticated applications to be developed, thus more sophisticated data to be collected and better insights derived: 1/ optimize the software or 2/ optimize the hardware.

It may sound obvious but despite the cloud, we still live in a physical world and must abide by its laws. The evolution of technology is likely to moving both variables ahead at the same time and it is really together that they will move us closer to, not only collecting data on a frequency (volume) basis that we can only fathom today, but also run that data through (process) more and more complex correlative algorithms that today would make the fastest processors come to an instant crawl.

None other than Qualcomm is already taking a jump start in this race with its latest processor christened “Snapdragon“. Not just for the love of speed but because Qualcomm has a platform, SDK for the geeks out there, called Gimball. Check out the video!

Future! Here we come! And Teri, thanks for the stimulating convo.

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The “internet of things”, the sweeping tech revolution we are living, is as scary to many as it is exciting to some. This revolution may even have in store, dreams come true. For baby boomers they are dreams from past times, for the Gen X and Millenials amongst us they are only recounted. Either way they are dreams of power. The flower power kind; albeit an upgraded one.

In a post Occupy world, organizations everywhere should contemplate the themes that flooded the undercurrent of one of the greatest consumer uprisings in recent history — Brian Solis

The social media revolution in a silo has come and passed. Using the lure of democratized information access and production, it has huddled the masses online; promising total freedom of expression, of the people, by the people for a new tomorrow. ‘Social’ did jump start the Internet of Things (IoT) and is now an integral enabler of our lives in both form an substance.

Mobile connectivity, initiated the internet’s push back from desks and couches into the wild. And the Internet of Things only accelerated its expansion ever since: TVs, cars, homes and even glasses have been hooked back up to the ‘almighty’ cloud. If those mundane objects can have a life, why not the billion others in existence? Why couldn’t every existing thing be shrouded in a digital layer and, virtually be made alive. What will those things tell us about our very selves and our environment then? How could ‘listening’ to those things, make our lives better? Easier, faster, maybe even fairer, healthier and richer.

“Everywhere we go in the world, the things that we come across aren’t intelligent. Like this wall that I’m looking at, it’s just separating the room from the other side. In actuality, that wall should be intelligent. The next 10 years [will be] nuts.” — will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas, Intel’s Director of Creative Innovation

The digital shrouding of things is the revolution we are living. This, is the new frontier to be conquered.

The Hippie movement peaked in an unsustainable haze of psychedelic rock, sexual excesses and altered states of consciousness, on the backs of cannabis, LSD and magic mushrooms. It culminated, at a music festival north of New York City, in a small country town called, Woodstock. But it behooves us to note the similarities and the differences that might just make the Internet of Things closer to fulfilling the similar promise of a new world. 

Our world is a reflection of ourselves, thus the revolution has long been coming. Complete with dreams of change and power. What implications on our desires, aspirations and ability to effect change on our world? To what extent will dreams of a new world, be now enabled by technology?

“If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things —using data they gathered without any help from us— we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost.” — Kevin Ashton, RFID father, coined the term “Internet of Things“

 — Yesterday — Today — Tomorrow —

We are only at the beginning, it is estimated that 99% of things in the world are still not connected. According to @CiscoSystems’ very own futurist, Dave Evans aka @DaveTheFuturist, we’re now entering the Internet of Everything (IoE) era. Cisco recently estimated the impact of IoE at a very respectable $14.4 Trillion.

In February, Le Web 2013 announced its subject: “Digital Hippies: Create a New Sharing Economy“. Le Web is a forward looking, large tech conference taking place every year in Europe.

The event’s organizers are usually right on the money when it comes to foreseeing online and digital trends. This time, it is touching on a rather “soft” point, aiming at the substance of the digital revolution, rather than its form.

Although this year’s subject wording is not fortuitous, Loic Lemeur aka @Loic and Le Web’s founder, is quick to distance his organization from the flower power movement in his video announcement. I’ll grant him that today’s undercurrent has considerably evolved over the past 50 years.

— Yesterday — 

The original flower power movement started in the 1950s, with the beret-wearing beatniks hailing from New York and it continued with the hippie movement in the mid-1960s. In the very Mecca where the current digital revolution has its roots: San Francisco, California.

The first known use of the word hippie was in 1965, according to the Merriam Webster dictionary. The term is thought to have originated from hip, which some attributed to hipi, a word in the West African Wolof language meaning “to open one’s eyes”.

In his 1964 autobiography, Malcolm X referred to the word hippy as a term African Americans used to describe a specific type of white man who “acted more Negro than Negroes“. Harry Gibson, a boogie woogie virtuoso of the time who claims to have first coined the word hipster, certainly fits that description in this video.

Today’s geeks that fuel the construction of the Internet of Things, can certainly be qualified as hipsters. Their eyes opened, by the prospect of dust speck-sized sensors, to the possibilities of the new world ahead. Where their ancestors, in internet-time terms, used conscience altering substances to “open their eyes”; today’s hipsters are using technology to do the same, making the ideal goal of a new way of life far more sustainable and reachable.

As a testimonial to these hipsters aspirations, suffice to look at a recent Accenture study that shows men and women no longer defining career success by the amount of money they make. Putting work-life balance — ahead of money, recognition and autonomy; more than half of those surveyed report to have turned down a job offer because of the potential impact on their work-life balance. This aspiration is certainly not new but now, technology is enabling and empowering these hipsters to demand it as an element of a better quality of life.

— Today —

In many aspects, today’s rekindled dreams of power, live in a world where karma fearing and forward payments are ways of life. Anyone spending any amount of social time online can attest to the ever-growing ‘karma religion’, illustrated by the myriad motivational messages and quotes shared that run the range of corniest to most inspirational. Conversations about positivity, the strive to help and the obligation to pay it forward, seem more socially acceptable today. Conversations on the subjects abound, in contexts as disparate as selling apps to building real estate businesses, to fighting cancer, to getting rich, to saving the world from climate change. Listen to wine-loving-business-man-social-media-celebrity-thank-you-saying-advocate, Gary Vaynerchuk aka @GaryVee.

Questions come up as to where this undercurrent is stemming from: is it that humans have a basic good nature that has recently been enabled by technology? Or it is the endemic oxytocin addiction? More specifically:

1. Has all this need for positivity always existed? If we believe the above good-natured assertion,
   probably to a certain extent. Was it brought on by our recent superability to connect with each other? Maybe it started with, and continues to feed on, the surge in oxytocin brain levels brought on by the use of social media. Oxytocin is a brain chemical called cuddle hormone or trust molecule, responsible for empathy. Will we all progressively turn into oxytocin-addicts, oblivious to the realities of our physical world? Sort of like the 60s’ hippies were? Floating to the demise of their ideal of love, equality and acceptance, in a psychedelic haze of rock, sex and drugs? Or…
2. Are we slowly progressing towards a better functioning world enabled by technology? A world pressured to change from all sides by the failures of its fundamentals and the power of a Metcalfed technology. Failures pooled from the depth of individual minds to the surfaces of the social web. A world with new values and yardsticks, a world of de facto win-wins for starters. A world where technology, the Digital Revolution and the Internet of Things and Everything, all together expand the human brain abilities beyond its strictest primal needs, enabling more productivity and effectiveness, new ways to pronounce judgments and make decisions for a better quality of life.

— Tomorrow — 

Time will tell. One thing is for sure: the internet of things is changing expectations and if expectations change, behaviors will change as a result. Amy Cuddy, a social scientist, in her recent TED talk demonstrates that expectations affect behaviors and behaviors affect outcomes. She concludes to not mean “fake it until you make it but until you become it“. Our behaviors are, to a large extent, affected by what we expect there to be in store as a result, thus affecting our achievements in turn.

Thus if we agree that the desire to change one’s world is in pent up demand, will pooling these expectations over the billions of technology-enabled connections establishing themselves everyday, be the world changing tipping force?

So far, Millenials’ concerns seem in line to somehow, affect their environment on a deeper level. In 2007, cancer, animal rights and education were their top causes. This year, education, ending poverty, and the environment are their key concerns according to The Intelligence Group. Will their sustained digital activism via a mobile device, from the comfort of distance from inconvenience, effect real change? Or will their noise drown and weaken disparate actions, occurring over too long of time periods? If we are to believe @DaveTheFuturist, the ubiquity of technology may trump willpower and bridge that gap.

“They [Millennials] actualize their most important values and stand behind them with every thing they do to bring about change.” — Altimeter Group’s Brian Solis aka @BrianSolis in this Forbes article

Since human behavior always defaults to the least amount of effort, expectations and thus behaviors and achievements, will continue to shift; further compounded by the increasing omnipresence of the Internet of Things.

Expectations will shift from searching for a product or service or even for an ideology or a cause; to expecting to being somehow engaged about it, whenever the need arises or behavior calls for it. As a result, it will be even less about which organization is the loudest or even the most engaging. It will be about the one that’s smartest about knowing its community, and maintaining in place the right triggers to activate the most relevant engagement, at the most appropriate time. Picture the shift in business behavior this will demand. Picture the need in listening and analytical power required. Picture also the level of relevance the current way of doing business has.

To conclude and underscore the magnitude of change we are living; if two in three Millennials believe a person on a computer spreading the word, can create more change than a person on the street, rallying or protesting.

I wonder: what makes them so sure? Is that belief factual? Is it a some type of faith? In what? Technology only? Or is it simply the oxytocin addiction speaking?

I wonder: How will the omnipresence of a tech shroud on all existing things, affect a population that not only increasingly report not identifying with any religion (Pew Research Center) but also overwhelmingly believe, and across political party lines, in themes eerily reminiscent of cliches from the 1960s?

Will.i.am is probably right ‘The next 10 years [will be] nuts‘.

To be continued…

Survey | A Generation in Transition: Religion, Values, and Politics among College-Age Millennials — Public Religion Research Institute — Click image for details.

The post The Internet of Things Picks Up Where Woodstock Left Off appeared first on Yacine Baroudi.

A great quote shared this evening by the excellent Gerry Wendel aka @modlandUSA. Can you relate?

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