New age calls for new data and techniques — A healthcare perspective

Dear readers,

Modern times are often always accompanied with modern problems, each of which need innovative and fresh solutions. Even in the field of data science we are not paying much attention to new methods and techniques, though this is one of the most new and thriving technology, influencing from our lives to our personality, marriages, health, education, finance to even law and order. Don’t worry it is not taking over you or your life, it is just analysing the immensely huge amounts of information you generate over your life time. Big data isn’t some buzz or bluff, it is information that is collected over a huge population. Big data is nothing but big amount of data. It is more of a problem to data scientist as it demands for new techniques. But it is a boon too, as it can help them make better analysis. Hopefully this blog will be much short and focused.

My main agenda for this blog is to briefly discuss the ongoing data crisis in healthcare and its probable solutions.

Do you remember your first dataset? As in the first one you used for data analysis. It is most probably the diabetes prediction, for classification based on some 18 indicators. It is kind of sufficient, but is it?

Let me tell you that I don’t know much about other diseases but I do know a great deal about diabetes. Unfortunately it runs in the family, and both my parents are diabetic. So I know how stress levels, sleep quality and climate may influence a a person’s blood sugar levels.

With modern retinopathy technologies, scanning the retina of the eye is enough to test blood sugar levels. Researchers from India, collaborated with Google to use TensorFlow to analyse and compute upon the data to generate reports.

But blood sugar test kits are like the Pen-Refil business in India. India being the diabetic capital of the world. Millions of people buy these kits which have a life expectancy of 2 to 3 years and keep on buying the strips.

Data science and big data is planning to revolutionize this. I was working at the frontier for smart testing. I saw the potential it might had. Especially for poor people.

In the year 2020, when COVID hit, my knowledge on statistics, biology, ecology, environment and data science was limited but the scope of my curiousity wasn’t. I started meeting people and speaking my ideas with them. I first started working on flood alert systems, then I was working on a system that could receive electrical signals from brain whenever the lips moved, this enabled a dumb person’s lip to be read easily. I was also working on a device which would take input of the world around us and send electrical signals back into the brain enabling people to see an imagery, that is not real but an imaginative context or maybe something like a mental imagery, this would help the blind see in a false manner, as to seeing things like other but via electrical signals. I had many more projects but due to lack of deep knowledge I was achieving the most out of my intuition and technical acumen and creativity or innovative. I had to abandon my dreams due to lack of funding and I wished to learn more and leave these ideas to other to develop upon and thankfully they did great jobs at faithfully developing it, only it was not under the banner of HAESolve.

Thousands of thousands of ideas of mine, flowed and streamlined. Even recently I won an innovative thinkers award for my ideas. But now I know that my happy place is problem solving not business. Recently I also started another project, which is what I am going to expand upon in this blog. With 2 more developer friends, I was trying to plan on virtual tourism plans, and web3 murals for the new generation of artists and more. An intriguing idea, crossed my mind, what if we had health banks, that stored the medical reports and day to day data that it received from wearables, and people get their very own health card that hold their medical information, not only does it save but it also uses the data and makes useful predictions, and such technology cna predict illnesses way before the first symptoms are noticeable.

Many more such innovations were about to come, and the machine learning based enzyme engineering was under going it's development, path breaking technology that could lead way for medicine design and various other stuff. But for the manifestation of these ideas, we need more and more data and information, in this age of Big Data, it is evident that data is being generated everywhere in huge volumes, but what isnt known is that Big Data isnt owned by the mass, it isn't available to the mass, for fair reasons, and hence it's also expensive for its huge demand in the industry.

But my story isn't about data availability, it's not also about ground breaking research, it's about the ground reality that lack of utilisation of huge pools of public data for the right things, like for planning of smart cities, or planning of housing, or about public education and healthcare is the biggest reason for the great divergence between our present and our expected. The real use of big data, all this data that we are generating, is for no other reason but for the upliftment of the economy and for the people's use. Governments must make good use of the data that is generated during its regime, to take better decisions. Decentralisation of political institutions isn't the key to action when it comes to complicated, socio-economic systems like that of a nation, political induction finds its way into the system, one way or the other.

Thank you for reading, hope you enjoyed it, hope to see more innovations soon, and for more data to be collected, thoughtfully designed experiments to be done, and better days to come.