A few months ago Quantified Self received an invitation from the Health Informatics Society of Australia to speak to their members at their annual conference hic2012. They wanted to hear a QS perspective on the future of healthcare.
I volunteered to go down under, to share some interesting self-tracking stories, and to speak about the possible impact of self-tracking on the world of healthcare. I drew analogies to the revolution caused by personal computing — the liberation of computing from the province of an elite few to a tool for the masses — to the revolution that might be caused by the advancement of personal science — a similar liberation of health science, and titled the talk “The Future of Healthcare: Innovation at the Edge”.
This was the teaser description of the keynote from the conference program:
Nearly 40 years ago in Silicon Valley, a group of pioneers leveraged technological advances and new ways of thinking to make computing personal. Computing went from being dismissed as a tool of bureaucratic control to being embraced as a symbol of individual expression and liberation. The creativity of millions of individuals was unleashed. Their experimentation has changed the world, often exceeding the innovation from traditional institutions. Today another generation is leveraging technological advances and new ways of thinking to make healthcare personal. They are developing and using tools, technologies, ideas and communities to enable and empower individuals to understand and manage their own health. They are encouraging and supporting crowd-sourced scientific advancements. What are these people doing? What tools are they using? What have they learnt? And how is all this activity going to impact traditional healthcare institutions, the nature of care services, and the pace of health technology innovation?