Editor: Vanessa Carter
South African MRSA and Facial Difference ePatient
Founder of #hcsmSA
Website: www.vanessacarter.co.za

Leveraging the Internet of Things globally for Precision Medicine
What should connect globally to make sure that big data is functional to precision medicine?

From the editor’s desk:

Welcome to the Society for Participatory Medicine Newsletter, March edition. Most of us who are working in digital health are still learning about the Internet of Things (IoT), we all have ideas of what it will be. The “IoT” presents an immense opportunity to solve numerous issues in healthcare for not only the patient but for everyone else using this emerging technology.

In the past, although systems were based on the patient-centered idea, it was never designed around the patient in terms of actually researching their journey to create more functional systems. Today, some of the most fundamental barriers we face in medicine are related to fragmented data, users working in isolation and the inability to access a comprehensive medical history to provide the highest standard of treatment. The point of connected health and the IoT is to close all those gaps and improve infrastructure globally using the cloud, connected devices and people.

One predominant crisis which affects everyone globally is the emergence of drug-resistant diseases like MRSA, Zika and Ebola that will require extremely innovative solutions to monitor data points that measure aspects such as malnutrition, cultural diversity, pollution, diet, climate change, sanitation and social-economic factors like poverty. These areas of health are important to connected health because disease travels.

This newsletter addresses the basic ideas of what “Things” should connect globally so that big data is absolutely functional to global genomic medicine.

Steve Jobs was a visionary leader and believed that design and technology could change the world, but he also spoke about how important the function was in relation to it’s form. If the IoT is going to gather data to improve human health, it needs to consider every “thing” which helps it to meet that goal.