Clearly, the well-being of any organization rests upon the well-being of its constituency. Now imagine a well-designed, sustainable architecture to collect and disseminate medical advances within a globally/glocally linked network. Here is the fulcrum with which to leverage overall well-being in societies and progress towards a more productive humanity.

Problem

Amongst the vast possibilities from this hack, we foremost seek to address the structural inequalities created in the distribution of up-to-date medical knowledge to practitioners across the globe.We also seek to confront the problems presented by the gathering of data on allied health sciences, including disease cause and transmission, so that more effective, preventive models can be modeled and constructed. The importance of this problem is becoming ever more apparent, given that the human population has just reached seven billion (more people than have otherwise existed in the entirety of human history). With people packed ever more densely into urban centers, communication with regards both to epidemiological and basic healthcare issues will only become more pressing as a fully globalized society continues to emerge.

We live ina world constructed of institutions and organizations at every level. What better way to implement a cause towards advances in benefit for all of humanity than by accessing them directly? Note that these organizations are built by people - each one unique in various ways, with a life-path of their own, including their health progression. As attributed to eminent physician-writer William Osler, "Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease." We aim to systematically help solve the problems based on this singular contingency within the means of organizations around the world.

Solution

General Solution
The core component of our solution is a
primarily computation oriented architecture,built to allow micro-scale and macro-scale metrics of disease transmission to emerge and be tested, based on real-world data sets with historical time lapses. A simple examplecould be usingcross-sectional techniques from epidemiology and related statistical fields to understand and conceptualize the data sets gathered in this manner.

So, as indicated, the PIP: Personalized Informatics Platform is targeted towards humans and conceptually built around them and the ecologies they live in. APSSA -the acronym for Agents, Protocols, Sensors, Server Architecture- is PIP's computation-intensive, analytical framework and systems approach to human welfare, organizations, andcivilization as a whole. William Osler also noted the phenomenon that: "Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability." Our hack seeks to outline the systemic solution that will tackle that phenomenon.

This will allow the first-hand knowledge of practitioners in various health fields to constantly increase, giving these practitioners up to the minute feedback and information on treatment and prevention options from their colleagues and researchers worldwide. In one light, it is possible to think of this hack as crowdsourcing taken to the limit.

Individual Privacy and Overall Security in Context

Of course,with any such system there will undoubtedly be numerous security and privacy concerns. PIP will be built from the ground up to honor human liberty and dignity. Thiswill be maintained through complete transparencyin components and implementation. Only composite instances of health analytics and disease would be stored,rather than entire medical records linked to a particular individual.The medical record itself would remain in the hands of the end-user (an individual who is a patient or a consumer of services/products). Finally, this hack-project will, in constitution, always be fundamentally opt-in-based.

Solutions to Research Quality and Distribution, as well as dealing with Vested Interests

We expect that this will result in a revolutionary change in how members of affected organizations relate to others, both inside their organization and out, with the ultimate goal being broader global outreach. Management processes for aiding members/employees for many health-related issues will be simplified in several regards. For instance, in regards to the studies of John P. A. Ioannidis, it has been clearly instigated via meta-studies of peer-reviewed research publications that in even the highest tiers of medical journals, data from healthcare studies is notoriously unreliable in the long run. Also note that this hack's proposition helps target the notorious issue of studies underwritten and products/servicesdelivered by vested interests. Instead, the hack would fundamentally rely on metrics of human health left in the hands of doctors in the field, as well as researchers and scientists working to improve the conditions of human existence. This will be facilitated with the assistance of modern innovations in ICT(s), especially mobile communications and computation-based technologies.

Practical Impact

Universal Benefits, in Traditionally Developed and Developing World

On the whole, in the relatively short-to-long run, this would not be a difficult hack to implement on the large scale, especially considering the widespread popularization of mobile technology in the developing world. Any doctor could access the database either via a laptop computer, a tablet, a smartphone or

any future device; and immediately have access to the increasing compendium of data, condensed historical (time-lapsed) information and analysis, as well as encouraging development of powerful, integrated macro-toolsets in various public and private infrastructures (as desired within self-enforced limits) and the ability to participate in the first perpetual living study of humanity's health issues, including disease vectors and risk factors. Of course, all this means that the hack will help to take healthcare out of the hands ofprivate industry more concerned with profit than well being,and putting it back where it belongs, in the hands of scientists and medical professionals.

Dealing with Epidemics and Basic Healthcare Needs

For instance, when looking at the projected cases of future superbug epidemics, how remarkable would this robust platform be with any number of use cases, including in helping to find and accelerate solutions to these upcoming problems. With all the unknown unknowns and uncertainty-riddled world, surely, this is something to proceed towards. Even in non-epidemic cases, this hack would serve as an utilitarian library of best practices and new indicators that can be designed to screen out methodological flaws through the use of a now-implementable day-to-day empiricism that doctors can use in their practices and rounds. In other words, a well-designed evidencebased approach is presented that will increase the degrees of success in the peer-reviewed journal community and also aid the fields of praxis that this research leads into by relation.

First Steps

Commitment of the General Public

Anyone willing to contribute to the commons of PIP can do so primarily by way of creating/developing agents (software applications) and building sensors (various hardware, consigned to be within open standards ideally). Think of this process as being metaphorically comparable to individuals building extensions and bookmarklets to popular browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer in a way.

They can also help build the embeddable, virtualized server and integrate various protocols and permission logics into the architecture, legal or ethical or otherwise. But please note, despite the commons motif, there are plenty of monetization possibilities and B2B and B2C strategies that can utilize PIP.

Centrality of Agents and Sensors

Agents are created by software development processes, are coded with various pragramming languages and will promote API features for third-party extensibility. As for sensors, this side is ideal for the passionate with expertise and craftsmanship in various biotech fields, material sciences and related computer engineering domains. Most sensors they wish to test must alsoeventually work in the field (as opposed to in just controlled settings or lab settings). Remember, practicality is emphasized.Of course, for instance, various types of imaging will not meet this criterion with modern techniques.

Treating humans and their diseases as living structures remainsa central focus of this project, enabling us to capture more than periodic snapshots. Of the four spheres of PIP's architecture, the sensors and the agents are where the beauty of the PIP's APSSA will be most visible.

An Example

As for an easy implementation, an equivalent ''hello world'' example is of course creating an agent to monitor heart beats per minute, an existing rudimentary metric, and a simple palpitations-counting device placeable on the body near a target vessel. A more complex version would have coordinated agents and sensors able to monitor EEG recordings and distinguish abnormal patterns to find underlying causes and present solutions. All this can be accomplished with relative simplicity, even at the beginning of the hack initiation, by integrating mobile computing with existing medical technology. Of course, the initial demonstrations of the platform's capabilities have existing alternatives, but in the longer course, much more sophisticated possibilities can surely be imagined, conjured, designed, modeled, created, manufactured and so forth.

Credits

Taylor Bolinger <taylorbolinger@gmail.com>
Contributions: Editor, Writing, Ideation, Presentation (Prezi)

Saran Eswaran <saraneswaran@msn.com>
Contributions: Concept, Writing, Ideation, Technical Expertise, Presentation (Prezi)

License
Frontiers in Crowdsourced Medicine: Hacking Our Way Towards Universal Wellness Paradigms by Saran Eswaran & Taylor Bolinger is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

http://creativecommons.org/choose/results-one?q_1=2&q_1=1&field_commercial=n&field_derivatives=n&field_jurisdiction=&field_format=Text&field_worktitle=Frontiers+in+Crowdsourced+Medicine%3A+Hacking+Our+Way+Towards+Universal+Wellness+Paradigms&field_attribute_to_name=Saran+Eswaran+%26+Taylor+Bolinger&field_attribute_to_url=&field_sourceurl=&field_morepermissionsurl=&lang=en_US&language=en_US&n_questions=3

Resources/References Used
In general, most of the content was written with prior knowledge. A few of the specifics were based from Wikiquotes & PLOS.

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