Use the Data Differently

I’ve long held the opinion that one of the dangers of technology is that it moves too fast. We often end up running before we can walk, and we’ll end up too far down the road without asking ourselves how we got there. Did everyone need a website in the year 2000? Probably not. The resulting hype around “dotcom” cost the stock market dearly. Had we had better planning, better appreciation of the technology and better comprehension of how it would affect our lives, then we could have rolled out the digital revolution without the markets going off the volatility springboard.

While I’m all for technology changing it up, we have to be really careful it doesn’t just serve to reinforce the negative biases and partialities of habit that we already have; it should be doing the exact opposite. One person who has experienced this firsthand is Minda Aguhob, founder of the community healthcare app, Vytality.

I spoke to Minda recently on my Creative Intelligence podcast. She described how a very serious cycling accident while training for a triathlon gave her the chance to reevaluate what was going on around her. Minda is now well recovered, but at the time she faced the daunting challenge of re-organizing her life while taking 30+ medicines and scoping out eight months of healing and physiotherapy.

Minda has studied at Harvard and Berkeley, addressed the UN and worked at TED and Tesla, bringing together skills as a psychologist and as a data scientist. She knows this space well, and she knows how and why people are looking to technology for answers. What she found following her accident was that the basics of healthcare — the real, practical fundamentals — were not served well by digital technology.

Her app, Vytality, doesn’t measure data such as heartbeats or footsteps. Instead, it tries to use data to bring together networks and communities that can greatly benefit the individuals involved. By simply knowing who you can turn to, to provide a specialist’s contact details, or who can take an hour out of their day to help you collect meds, you can greatly increase a person’s capacity to get better quicker. This means they don’t have to burden traditional healthcare with requests for services that they can easily receive locally. At the core of the company is the concept of co-care, which recognizes that we are all care givers and receivers in our own time.

The whole project is interpreting data differently, tracing the soft lines of personality, creativity and ambiguity to find great interpersonal relationships with an app. That is important because it reminds us that data is not all binary — it can illustrate complex human, almost emotive, experiences.

There’s a bit of social form here as personal interactions via technology can have huge consequences. It can subverts states; we saw this in traditional autocratic societies during the Arab Spring. Like previous “revolutions,” the topography of change fell along the old traditionalism vs modernism dichotomy of understanding. But now, 10 years later, we’re perhaps seeing a new edition of technology and it dissolves certain social silos and forges new ones independent of the usual controls. Some spaces are already reckoning with this — Estonia now offers an e-residency visa, while AI gives personal avatars complete digital autonomy and businesses the ability to clone themselves digitally.

When you move these frameworks around you realize that big data is not just something that can give you more detail about an established subject. Big data is an instrument we can use to discover whole new subjects and then, on from that, whole new processes and ways of thinking.

Minda’s company is a great example of that. Rather than looking at healthcare through the lens of patient numbers, cure rates, hospital beds or budgets, we should seek new knowledge through questions such as: How many people are affected by one person suddenly being unable to walk? What is the level of their dependence? What are the safeguards against this? How can the community support someone without impacting individual abilities? When we look at data this way it reveals new options, new problems and new solutions.

This is one microcosm of the universe of digital anthropology which I’ve been trying to explore for the last 10 years or so. It was a delight to speak with Minda on just this one aspect, but I sincerely hope these revelations in healthcare can have much wider and longer lasting repercussions. You can listen to the podcast here.