Call for a global scale system that detects early (pre-symptomatic) signs of infection and prevents rapid spread of highly infectious diseases
Leonard Khirug, PhD March 23 2020
“This storm will pass”, as Yuval Harari soberly reminds us in last week’s article in Financial Times. Until it does, the tremendous energy of the unfolding pandemic can crater our economy, undermine our mutual trust and uproot the very foundations of our daily lives. The energy that this pandemic has created is the energy of fear. The fear of death. The fear of losing shelter in an unprecedented economic crisis.
Yet there a flip side: if we harness this enormous energy wisely, if we ride this colossal wave skillfully instead of drowning in it — we can build up our immunity towards all kinds of social calamities, not just the ones triggered by a highly infectious virus.
Harnessing the Storm Power
To ride this storm, we shall reclaim the power that surveillance capitalism (REF) has gained on us — the overarching power of Big Data and machine learning algorithms. The power of our personal Big Data, the biographical, behavioral, physiological, and psychological data that we generate and “ooze” day by day, minute by minute. Our data that is quietly captured by wearable devices, social networks, geo-locators and other activity trackers.
In the pre-corona world we lived in just a few weeks ago, our personal Big Data was mostly used against us (e.g., to analyze and manipulate our attention and purchasing behavior). The mechanism was so oiled-up and profitable, that it seemed impossible to overturn it (just recall the trillion-dollar market capitalization of Google and other data-fueled corporations).
But the pandemic storm now provides the energy to change the way our personal data is used. We now have a unique chance to start using the Big Data to the advantage of individual data owners and of the societies these individuals live in.
Personal Big Data Management System
The three crucial steps towards the new data management practices are:
- collect and anonymize (de-identify) personal Big Data, so that third parties (advertisers, governments or anyone else) will not be able to use the personal Big Data to target the individual;
- analyze the anonymized data in a format that allows researchers to use machine learning and find previously unseen patterns (e.g., predicting specific sites of a highly infectious virus outbreak); and
- return the data to its owner in the form of self-knowledge and personalized well-being advice.
To succeed, we must start practicing this new data management right now, at the peak of the pandemic storm: start large-scale collection and analysis of those kinds of personal big data that can help minimize individuals’ suffering and societies’ economic damage. We shall monitor individual’s heart rate variability (HRV), which was shown to reliably detect early signs of infection several days before any noticeable symptoms appear (REF1, REF2).
By combining your HRV and geo-location, the automated system will analyze your anonymized personal Big Data and confidentially inform you about your level of infection risk. Equally importantly, the algorithm will accurately predict the future outbreak events, by identifying those pre-symptomatic virus carriers who have recently contacted each other — but without revealing the identity of these individuals. This will enable precise local interventions (e.g., district-wide rather than country-wide social isolation), which is far less damaging to the economy and to the citizen’s well-being than the blunt nation-wide shutdowns we are witnessing today.
Let’s be inspired by Yuval Harari’s reminder: “every crisis is also an opportunity”. Like any major crisis in human history, this one has the kind of energy that can, and will, generate the next upward jump in the evolution of the Humanity. It is our choice now: be destroyed by the blind energy of fear — or evolve consciously and learn how to use this energy wisely.
