Big data: Will it change your life?

A few days back in a general chit-chat, one of my friends asked me as to how cloud and big-data will impact our daily life. I have been thinking of big data, cloud and how it promises to transform my life for better. I capture one of the ideas below which impacts me big time.

A while back my daughter was diagnosed with Diabetes and ever since, we have been looking for ways to understand the disease better and track/analyse data to manage it well for our daughter based on patterns. Our observation indicates that patterns needs to be decoded at an individual level, hereditary level and various other parameters.

However, the patterns today in health care are purely based on taking all patients in same group or on a finite set based on age and a few variables. As an example, Doctors have always prescribed to avoid sweet corn for Diabetic paitients. It has high glycemic index and expected to shoot up the sugar. The only variable indicator is glycemic index. However our observations are totally different, we do not see the sugar readings shoot up after a serving of sweet corn for our daughter.

Another interesting observation was that when we travelled, we found that her sugar was shooting up without any reason, with same diet. The root cause was found to be milk brand. Though none of the two brands have any added sugar as per food chart.

There are multiple factors apart from diabetes, food habit like heriditary aspects and other factors which are not accounted for in a routine recommendation.

I believe, if we were able to capture all the data effectively for all diabetic patients and map it back to huge pool of data, analyse the patterns then medications and precautions for my daughter will be very different.

The combination of genome data, sugar levels from various patients, food habits and their impact will give us insights to create patterns based on number of factors.

Following set of apps will provide a rich source of data and recommendation which can make all the difference:

1. A Logbook which has the blood sugar levels and eating habits of an individual. Such applications already exist in plenty. These apps need to share data in cloud so that it can be used for recommendations.
2. Genome data to be available in cloud for making inferences
3. Glycemic and other attributes of foods which can be used to make inferences. The food agencies need to make sure that this data is available through APIs for any other apps to consume.
4. An analytical layer on top of all this to derive recommendations.

If we bring these pieces together then the App will be very intelligent which will not only record data but also make personalised recommendations. As an example following can be a conversation between an App and user:

User: Should I eat an Apple? 
Health managemt App: No apple will not work for you and current sugar level is 132 which is on higher side. Have a bowl of Salad. Following veggies are available in your fridge to treat yourself with salad.

Such apps can also be a good way to understand potential risks for any individual based on genome, family background, profession and make recommendations of food, exercise patterns and also the music. At a certain stage, the technology will become such an inherent part of our life that every act will be preceded and controlled by technology. The cloud and big data will play a major role in same.  A new borne child will not only be given vaccines but provided with a set of devices which will track everything he/she goes through and based on the data from these devices, the new generation apps will make recommendations. The cognitive behaviour of individual will be dictated based on recommendations from such apps.

Moreover the Health care professionals will be able to conclude a lot more meaningful insights which map to a group of individuals.

This is one example of how it will change life for people with diabetes and in domain of healthcare. The big data will play a major role to relate all data and analyse the same to make recommendations. 

This is a beginning of a new era where every action is recorded and every action might be supported by technology. There are many more such scenarios which will become enabled and already our shopping habits, travel schedule, ticket pricing, rainfall predictions are being governed through analysis from big data. The impact will only increase as the number of devices tracking data increases and ability to analyse data from different sources increase. It all depends on how fast such devices make commercial inroads into our lives.

Thoughts/Comments on this are welcome.