ARM Community: Meta-self and Personal Medical Modeling - ARM Community

As mentioned in a previous blog, “The Road from Smartphone to Meta-Self – a Phone that Truly Knows Me” I suggested the concept of a device knowing about you. I received some interesting commentary specifically around the concept of privacy which I accept is a major challenge and is very much an important issue on this current blog also. I want to table that subject for a later blog but today I want to focus on extending meta-self to create what I call a Personal Medical Model.

Today we go to a doctor with a specific aliment and that aliment is handled and a report is written about the visit. This information is static and is only a point piece of information and cannot generally be used to describe the complexity of the human system. What if we combined the power of mobile devices plus the cloud to build a medical model of ourselves?

Instead of just going to the doctor with the aliment, the doctor would see a current model of your health - where data is constantly being added and modified. The data could be as mundane as the walking distance traveled or more interesting data such as recording blood pressure or blood sugar levels during a 24-hrs period. Having advanced technology at the edge of the system means new ways of collecting data and monitoring can occur which has the potential to provide major health benefits to all of us.

Mobile, internet and search have changed many areas of sociality where we no longer rely on “what we know” and it is more “how we find it”. Knowledge has outstripped our ability to store all the information so we need assistance in the form of tools. Mobile devices are these tools. With Personal Medical Modeling you can own and add information – where doctors can have the ability to query the model and get notifications if it appears something is working out-of-bounds.

Today we can see some of the potential with IBM’s Watson being re-deployed for medical research.

Providing a single model which fits all has always been an impossible task but with the advancement of mobile devices comes the ability to create individual models which grow and adapt with time. The big question to ask is - are we close? And would this be useful? I personally think this would be a step in the right direction.

Andrew N. Sloss, Consultant Engineer, ARM, He is interested in future software technologies and trends. In particular, Andrew looks at how software can make use of low power devices in new innovating ways. Andrew is an author, Fellow of the British Computer Society, and currently holds the chair of the ARM Bindings Sub Team for UEFI.