I had the opportunity to speak to the head of this project Andrew Conrad at length.
https://medium.com/backchannel/were-hoping-to-build-the-tric...
What struck me was his optimism that this was really going to happen. Usually researchers are ultra cautious about going out on a limb like that (Yes, he said there was much to do, but read the interview to get his tone.) I think that comes from working at a place like Google X that encourages the big reach.
I was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor less than a year ago. It is a tumor that has been growing inside me for at least 5 years. Had it been correctly detected/diagnosed 5 years ago, it would have been an operable tumor with a high chance of a cure rate. Unfortunately, now that tumor is currently non-operable.
Current cancer screening guidelines aren't sufficient and in almost all cases they utterly fail in the early detection of cancers for people under the age of 50.
I applaud anyone working towards a better method for early detection!
I am so sorry to hear that! My mother, also, was found with a tumor that we didn't know about for a long time. She fought as long as she could. She never gave up hope.
Doctors don't know everything. There are ways to fight, even natural ones. Fighting with anything is better than giving up. Hope is very powerful. Don't give up. Keep fighting.
Best wishes to you from one who has walked this road with another.
Stay strong. I use your application as well, rescuetimer. I really like the logging it does. Can you tell me if it is written in C++ or is it mostly and mixed with other languages as well?
I think many people who have been seriously involved in medicine will tell you that there's many low hanging fruit in medicine that are being missed because misaligned incentive structures in the health care sector- This project sounds like a possible example of this.
We can only hope that a few well-capitalized companies like Google can have the vision to see these low hanging fruit, and will be able to bear the near-term risks and costs and take some difficult steps to reap some significant profits over a longer term.
It was a great interview. Andy has the enviable position of having successfully delivered many medical devices through the regulatory process, which makes him very valuable to Google- momentum, to get biomedical projects to the point where they are deployed at scale, is a rare thing.
The nature of biomedicine and the regulatory process means that the people who are most likely to succeed have big ambitions, work hard, are very smart, and wise, and large ability to ignore the fact something appears impossible.
I was skeptical this will truly revolutionze discovery and treatment of cancer, but I suspect it will at least push the needle a bit- in cancer, many late stage drugs are valued for extending life by a few months. A few months-- at hundreds of thousands of dollar costs! It's great that X has committed to funding this, and populating it with lots of talented engineers and I hope they make a positive impact with a limited budget.
I believe the snarky Inquirer take on this (after a previously touted splash of cash on life extension) was "because dead people don't click on ads". At least funnier than the standard flavor of Haterade.
>Haters: "No thanks, way too intrusive. I don't want you tracking me/selling my data/showing me ads."
Why is anyone cynical of such an activity deemed a "hater"? Because they don't conform and align with your own views on the subject?
Why not go on step further into common internet vitriol and just label them "trolls" for said disagreement?
I've no issue with Google producing such a product and me buying it, even at a relatively high cost, if the benefits are there. What I don't want is to pay a significant chunk of money for said product AND still have to hand over biochemical data to Google, an advertising firm, to use the thing.
> Around 2002 I attended a small party for Google—before its IPO, when it only focused on search. I struck up a conversation with Larry Page, Google's brilliant cofounder, who became the company's CEO in 2011. “Larry, I still don't get it. There are so many search companies. Web search, for free? Where does that get you?” My unimaginative blindness is solid evidence that predicting is hard, especially about the future, but in my defense this was before Google had ramped up its ad-auction scheme to generate real income, long before YouTube or any other major acquisitions. I was not the only avid user of its search site who thought it would not last long.
> But Page's reply has always stuck with me: “Oh, we're really making an AI.”
Seeing projects like this only affirm what I've generally felt about Google. They don't build stuff to sell ads. They sell ads to do cool stuff like this.
Decreasing contrast in the background of ads, this especially hurts older people as ability to see contrast decreases with age, and the FTC found that almost half the people fail to notice that there are ads on the page, thus forcing products that are first in the organic results to pay Google for ads.
Tracking the emails in the free Google Apps for Education and even paid Google Apps for Business to build ad profiles, making misleading statements to the public that they're not doing so, and then when it finally came to having to make statements to federal court, having to tell the truth about it and then claiming the consumer Gmail policy applied to Apps for Education data.
Tracking the physical location of Android phones for ad purposes without properly informing users and disabling things like Google Now if you disable the tracking.
Google employee accesses personal information of others. Google says it has fixed the issue, but how do we even know? Is there any legal safeguard against someone at Google reading your email?
Stopping Acer from shipping Aliyun OS by threatening to pull the Play Store and Android beta access. Bonus points for enforcing this by the duplicitous moniker 'Open Handset Alliance' doublespeak
Making people literally cry with the forced Google+ integration into Youtube and making confusing UX to make people share more than they want to, in order to compete with Facebook.
Companies over time become whatever their revenue stream requires of them. There are exceptions, but very few.
If you'd like to read further, The Innovator's Dilemma and related material has a lot of examples of companies where inertia around existing lines of revenue was strong enough to kill them.
But it's deeper than that. It's only obvious because those companies had their markets shift under them. I think the same sort of inertia is endemic, but it only becomes visible when circumstances change. E.g., look at the number of newspaper companies that existed before 1994, and look at how many are thriving today.
Google's not immune to this. Whatever wonders they come up with, the company is stuffed with people who are very good at selling their users (that is, us) to their customers (the advertisers). It's entirely reasonable to fear what those people will do with my medical data.
There's that, but I also think some users are still a little spooked about the whole NSA scare, and are hesitant to give up trust to a company that could be forcefully controlled by the NSA or secret court rulings.
It's not Google's fault, but more the U.S. Government for being incapable to reign in control of certain organizations.
Personally I don't care - from a data perspective I'm know I'm not a special snowflake, but for others I can understand their stress.
>>You see Google as a company that is just serving ads.
>>I see Google as a company collecting and organizing information.
You can see it however you want. The truth can be found by asking a simple question: how does Google make money? By serving ads. They may collect and organize information in the process, but ultimately they are an advertising company.
I'm on the fence about this detector. On the one hand, yes, there are significant benefits. On the other hand, the costs are also monumental. One has to cast their fanboy/hater hat aside and weigh these pros and cons carefully and objectively before making a decision.
If they came up with a highly effective method to quickly and inexpensively screen me for cancer or an impending heart attack...
I would do it because their interests are aligned with mine: they want me to live a lot longer so I can do a lot more searches and view more youtube videos etc, and so do I. Our reasons for wanting me to live longer are different, but they get their benefit and I get mine, fair trade.
Purely hypothetically: access to affordable medical insurance becomes contingent upon such a scan. You have a developing condition which will render you uninsurable.
I'm not suggesting Google would or even legally could consider creating a bidding system for insurance companies to use clean scans as a leadgen system, but in the unlikely event that they did feel so inclined, it wouldn't exactly be a wild departure from their business model
The best thing about the Affordable Care Act is that it prohibits discrimination based on preexisting conditions. If a sick person applies for health insurance, the insurance company has to issue it, and the rate can only be set based on your age, smoking status, and location.
So the entire risk pool/population has to bite the cost of the "previously uninsured"? Whether they want to or not? Sorry, nevermind that second question, it was rhetorical. Of course it doesn't matter if they want to or not, it's effectively a government mandated "tax". Taxes are almost never voluntary.
Yes, it makes sense if you think about that "tax" as the payment for the lottery ticket of a functioning body and brain.
Every person here won that lottery ticket, when we could have just as easily suffered from any number of horrible diseases and disorders. Not wanting to pay higher premiums b/c the "lotto losers" are included is like not wanting to pay for a lotto ticket after the fact because you know the rare outcome won't hit you.
So because the current best option is grouping people based on imprecise risk factors like age, demographics, and hereditary problems, we should forever turn a blind eye to individual warning signs even if they could save our lives?
This is a depressingly pessimistic way of ignoring the real underlying problem: health care is too fucking expensive.
2018: Google Health Scanner begins operation in selected pilot cities. Lines wrap around the block as people try to make it in while it's still free (even though the crowd is exclusively composed of people who could certainly afford it, because it's in a whitewashed, gentrified suburban neighborhood).
2019: Apple (January) and later Microsoft (October) respond with their own health scanners. Integrating with their respective data silos on personal health data, only people with iPhones or Windows Phones can be screened at an Apple Store Clinic or Windows You location.
2025: A federal case reveals that Google's initial scanner, in an attempt to reduce false positives, left millions with false confidence in their health. Google settles and introduces a subscription plan.
2027: Leaked emails, photographs, and a misconfigured Hangout that was broadcast live on YouTube show decisively that Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle are colluding to keep wages low for the medical staff they employ. Oracle doesn't even have any medical staff, it just wanted in on the collusion. The federal government reacts by saying "These people have our medical results now and we're not going near this with a ten-foot pole."
2030: Google announces Nexus Implant, a biometric device that relays data in real-time to Google. This is lauded by the CDC as a major help in combating epidemics. Apple launches iMe later that year. Microsoft released a biometric implant in 2004, but it was derided as "too clunky." Surface You comes out in 2032.
2031: For the 2031 flu season, biometrics users are advised to upgrade to a version with vaccination pods. Capable of being intelligently released if it detects you are exposed to a specific flu strain, this enables the immunocompromised to be "just-in-time vaccinated". Thanks to the tracking data reported back from the implants, flu is at an all-time low.
2033: Massive vulnerabilities rock the now ludicrously decrepit but still used X.509 CA infrastructure. Nobody discusses leaving X.509.
2034: First jailbreak exploits for iMe released, allowing users to circumvent the trusted computing chip on the iMe and load custom firmware. This is initially used by biohackers looking to access raw sensor data.
Spring 2035: Unrest in Bahrain turns coldly bloody as the regime infects anyone with an iMe, Nexus Implant, or Surface Inside with acute vaccination sickness, caused by firing all vaccination pods simultaneously (all implants are now pre-loaded with vaccinations for common infections). A postmortem of the attack determines that the Bahrainian national CA deployed an exploit similar to the jailbreak to issue rogue commands to the vaccination units.
Fall 2035: Protestors in China, Russia and the Ukraine keel over, eyes bleeding, as a custom-made virus is released from backdoored implants. Google defends placing the kill-switches as a cost of doing business in accordance with foreign law in foreign countries.
Winter 2035: As tensions run high during a trade dispute between China, Greater Korea, and Malaysia, rouge cyberattackers kill thousands of people using unpatched implants. Calls increase for implants to be recalled, but the flu season looks to be the worst in a long time, and critics say superbugs caused by on-demand antibiotics use via the CleanU app (YC 2033) could be more fatal than the unpatched implants. After heavy lobbying, Google supports Android Z for the Nexus Implant.
Spring 2036: The trade dispute worsens, and after a misstep on the part of a US mediator, a cyberattack from "patriotic Chinese citizens" kills several local, state, and federal government workers and politicians. Presidential hopeful Chris Schwarzenegger is killed. The United States demands sanctions on China, alleging the attack to have originating from PLA-controlled networks. Both countries enter into an economic death spiral as they try to disentangle their economies. A SpaceX launch is misinterpreted by a Chinese early-warning system as a nuclear launch and, fearing annihilation, the PRC unleashes its now-substantial nuclear arsenal on America and NATO. Russia interprets Ukraine-bound missiles as attacks on its soil and, confused by the stealth signatures, fires on NATO as well. The United Kingdom is destroyed instantaneously. This escalates to a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, New Rhodesia, and France. The world is a smoking ruin. As the radiation slowly declines over the next few million years, the wasteland left behind is left to the lichen.
Moral of the story? Stay away from Google's medical initiatives.
I am not necessarily convinced, but kudos for an imaginative, interesting, passionate contribution to the debate. With lots of nicely constructed details.
I doubt a company would jeopardize their reputation by doing that, and even if they did, the Affordable Care Act would prevent insurance companies from discriminating against you on your medical history or genetics.
The ACA, if left intact, would prevent companies from discriminating against you when they provide you with /health/ insurance. Life, disability, etc. not included.
"I want to give you this scan that might add a year to your life, for free! Isn't that awesome! Aren't I the coolest person in the world?"
"What do you get out of it?"
"Total access to your physical records, which may be shared with the feds based on an NSL, intercepted by various foreign governments without our knowledge (including our own government), sold on the open market by a bad employee, or just farmed out to advertisers in exchange for a buck."
"Ah. Er. What part of that was you being awesome again?"
ADD: Don't get me wrong; this is probably truly awesome. Could save hundreds of thousands of lives. Just don't blow smoke up my ass and tell me it doesn't come without a cost, it's costing all of us bit-by-bit. The bill is adding up.
Scanning to see cancers earlier and prevent heart attacks is not going to add 20 years to your life anyway. You can have organ failure even without cancer, and you can die of many other conditions as well. It's not a silver bullet.
This has nothing to do with health insurance. Google doesn't even sell health insurance. And if I understand correctly, health insurance companies aren't allowed to discriminate any more anyway.
Not that it's wrong though. Imagine if you said the same thing about fire insurance. That it was unfair that they were allowed to set higher premiums on wooden buildings. Or a better analogy, if the fire insurance companies wanted to come into the building and inspect the materials, foundation, the wiring, if the fire alarms worked, etc.
So, to be clear, you're fine with the idea of being uninsured because of your genome, or a pattern of posts which suggests you might have a chronic illness?
Just because it's "not allowed" doesn't mean it doesn't currently and won't in the future happen. They'll always find a way.
I would ideally like health care to be subsidized. But if you want an insurance based model, then you have to accept the realities of how insurance works. What you describe is against the entire point of insurance.
The point of insurance is to exploit the gap between perceived and actual risk, and to profit from it - it's not to provide a safety net, or anything of the sort - it's to make money.
By having greater knowledge about your prospective customer, you can better anticipate the probability and magnitude of any potential claim, and thereby adjust premiums accordingly, or simply refuse insurance as the prospect is likely to be either unprofitable or an active drain to the insurer.
So - this is absolutely aligned with the interests of the insurance industry - not of the consumer, no, but insurance never was aligned with their interests - were it, it would not exist.
The heart attack detector seems great, but I wonder about the cancer detector. It may lead to a high number of false positives resulting in unnecessary exposures to CT scans, which because it uses radiation can actually lead to cancer, and unnecessary medical procedures and expenses, and unnecessary anxiety. If they get the false positives down it would be very beneficial of course.
"In addition, whole-body CT can expose people to relatively large amounts of ionizing radiation—about 12 mSv, or four times the estimated average annual dose received from natural sources of radiation. Most doctors recommend against whole-body CT for people without any signs or symptoms of disease."
I have read that there is no such thing as a harmless amount radiation when it comes to the dosage you get from a CT scan. Every scan increases your risk. I think my impression is that many doctors think there must already be a health problem in the patient that needs to be addressed before someone is subjected to a CT scan. That is use a CT scan when you know it will help, not when you don't know.
That is technically true, but it's also true that every banana you eat adds to your risk. At some small percentage increase in risk, it's sensible to stop caring.
I know, but that proves that cancer scares people to the point of doing silly things. An innocuous screening test, even with a fair amount of false positives could be a huge win.
Are you sure it's CT scans? Why not MRIs, which as far as we know cause much less harm to the body? (They're more expensive, but I'd think people who are that worried about cancer would consider the extra expense worth it.)
While a CT scan may be the best known method to confirm later stage cancers now, a better and safer way may yet be discovered that can track the cancer's growth long before a doctor would recommend a scan. Nanoparticles could be a promising way to do that. If we're constantly made aware of many possible risks, the anxiety will (probably) eventually diminish as long as those risks are safely monitored. Overexposure to risks (that were always there) might be just what we need to explore better ways to track medical conditions before it's too late for treatment.
Seems like a straightforward optimization problem. Only alert someone if the expected probability of disease is high enough to be worth the risks of radiation and unnecessary procedures.
Many tests top out at 50% or less and even if the specificity is high you can't necessarily say whether you have a bad form of the disease or not. That's the problem with PSA testing for prostate cancer.
It is until you realize how complex it is to quantify the costs to be balanced (early detection treatment costs, quality-adjusted life years saved, radiation exposure risks, etc.)
There also isn't a straightforward way to tell if a detected cancer/precancer is actually harmful and needs treatment. Ductal carcinoma in situ is almost solely detected through routine mammograms. While 30 or so percent of these lesions will go on to become invasive breast cancer most will cause no symptoms, won't progress to cancer, and be harmless. Since there is no way to tell which cases of DCIS are harmful, usually cases of DCIS are treated as if they are invasive cancer.
Now, this poses an interesting question - what is an acceptable rate of over treatment? When does the harm outweigh the benefits? Those questions i don't have an answer to.
Though the PSA test is no longer recommended by some organizations for similar reasons. Same with the breast self exam.
When does detecting a cancer with no symptoms actually improve quality of life or longevity? These are very complex questions.
Do all or most of the existing cancer detection tests involve radioactive measurements? I would hope there would be a less dangerous 'next step' to confirm before moving on to CT scans.
Do all or most of the existing cancer detection tests involve radioactive measurements?
A follow-up test that involves inserting an instrument into a patient's body to gather a biopsy sample is also invasive. For a disease that has a high risk of early death AND CAN BE TREATED AFTER EARLY DETECTION, a rather invasive test can be justified. If the test result doesn't matter (it doesn't detect an important problem, or the problem it detects is an unsolvable problem), there is less justification for the test.
Good write-ups about the risks and benefits of medical screening[1] can be found at the Science-Based Medicine website, one of my favorite sites for discussion of medical research findings.
This is an issue of decision making on what you should do with the information to get the best outcome. There is nothing inherently bad about collecting the data itself.
It will be interesting to see how this progresses. As you said, false positives would certainly be a significant issue, and underlining that would be a question of liability.
If Google's scanner tells you that it has detected the formation of cancer in your body and is incorrect, putting someone through this could well be life altering in the short term.
Similarly, if you believe Google's scanner to be accurate and it fails to detect the formation of cancer, what then? If you get beyond the beneficial stages of early detection of this disease because your Google scanner tells you you're fine, how does that play out and who pays for it?
What if the device is compromised and someone can essentially have what they like reported to you?
Obviously I support any and all efforts to tackle cancer, but putting cancer detection into the hands of the end user has many potentially chaotic scenarios, and this is without mentioning the significant privacy issues that would surround such a device.
"Similarly, if you believe Google's scanner to be accurate and it fails to detect the formation of cancer, what then?"
The same as a CT scan that is a false negative?
" If you get beyond the beneficial stages of early detection of this disease because your Google scanner tells you you're fine, how does that play out and who pays for it?"
It's no different than it is now, where you got a CT scan, it said you were fine, and you weren't?
As for who pays for it, this is not a valid tort (medical malpractice is about accepted general standards of the industry. If the scanner meets those, it would not be negligence/malpractice no matter what it says)
"What if the device is compromised and someone can essentially have what they like reported to you?"
Uh, you realize plenty of these scans are remotely read already, right?
People can already report what they like, without any compromise.
Even ignoring that, the hospital machines/storage/etc are all compromisable too. Probably even easier to compromise than something built for end users.
I'm not worried about an "advertising agency" handling this project at all. Google is hardly just an ads agency anymore. They're multi-faceted. Maybe we should be concerned that they're(successfully) reaching their hands into just about every problem domain, but so far it's been good news for the consumer and they haven't done anything that I'm aware of to warrant them to be untrustworthy.
That being said. Watch your diet and carb intake. Preventative measures are better than having to fix the disease at the last minute.
I don't see why you're being downvoted. What about the accumulation of nanoparticles among cells, do they traverse the cell membrane? Can they cause cell withering or dysfunction, alter gene expression, hormonal balance or cause microcuts? What about when they degenerate?
This product was not made by amateurs and was on the market for about 30 years. Its key component was perfluorooctanesulfonamide, a precursor to perfluorooctane sulfonate, which lingers in the human body for five and a half years and can cause developmental delays, cancer, immune disorders, and all kinds of other things.
Amateurs can exercise due diligence and professionals can miss things.
Why do Apple, Google and major IT companies seem so much interested by our health suddenly ?
What are they planning to do with the data ? Just selling it ? (life insurance companies ?)
> Why do Apple, Google and major IT companies seem so much interested by our health suddenly ?
I have come to the conclusion that some of the tech visionaries recently are actually motivated, on the bottom-most level, by doing Good - in the old-fashioned moral sense.
As far as I can tell, Elon Musk is firmly in this category. Recently I've started to believe that Larry Page and Sergey Brin also belong here. Sure, they have companies and profits and board meetings to worry about, and of course they don't mind having their egos pampered a bit, but their prime motivator appears to be improving the future of humanity on a large scale.
Not everyone is like that, however. In fact, the list is very, very short. I'm only willing to put these three names on it, so far. Most of the others are energized by more mundane reasons, and of course there's also a minority of plain old villains out there.
You've named three unbelievably wealthy people who you believe are motivated to Do Good. Which is Iron Man? Which is Batman? And more terrifyingly, which is Ozymandius?
I think we're clear (or at least the press is) on who is Iron Man in this bunch.
Batman is still pretty cool, in my book. I've been around the block, and I've learned that to ask 100% kink-free moral perfection from human beings is a fool's errand. Stomp a few people's faces for the eventual greater good is fine, if you don't do it too much. Not sure if I could find an equivalent in real life, though. Maybe Bill Gates? No, he's more like the ruthless merchant turned philantropist.
Ozymandias is some famous media moguls, along with a bunch of finance tycoons for good measure. It's a far more popular archetype.
I'm sorry, I used to be a die-hard Linux desperado way back in the day, I must have some sort of mental block against Bill Gates.
Yes, I feel inclined more and more to add him, too, to the list. I hated his business tactics in the past, but his persona after retirement is nothing short of awesome.
Yes, it's not very nice to collude. On the other hand, were programmers get very good salaries. To some, maybe even Sergey, it might not seem like an urjent and critical moral issue,in the way that saving lives is.
If it's not an urgent and critical issue, then he would have just let it be, and would have let the free market for wages sort itself out. Instead, he actively sought to impair the ability of his own employees, the people he can most directly impact in life, to earn a living that was consistent with the intellectual capital they had spent years gaining, and all for the sake of his own personal gain. You guys can put as much lipstick on this pig as you want to, but what he did was truly shitty and not the action of a good person. Maybe he's changed, but I haven't heard an apology or anything (not that I'd expect to given the legal liability that would expose him to).
No doubt they have their skeletons in a closet, somewhere. The biggest paragon of morality is bound to have hurt someone, at some point. The obverse is certainly true of the greatest villains, too.
After a while, you learn to let go of details, step back, and consider the big picture. How will this person go down in history? That's what really matters. So far I'm getting very good vibes from these guys, overall.
Just to get this straight, you are under the impression that actually doing documented and premeditated bad deeds is irrelevant, but 'vibes' are important to developing an opinion on someone's character?
The thing about visionary technologists and supervillains is that it's pretty hard to tell the difference before the maniacal laughter starts. Still, I fucking love supervillains, so it's all good to me.
Tech companies these days have such massive cash hoards and low costs of borrowing: It's inevitable that any market with potential (or less cynically, any big problem that has the potential to do a lot of good) would be attractive.
Healthcare in particular is a Big Problem that can be attacked from many, many angles, and technology has a role to play in all of them (perhaps more than most other fields, since healthcare is notoriously slow to adopt technology/change[1]).
[1] To be fair, this is in part due to a culture of conservatism which has served the field well in general.
For the same reasons that a healthcare startup is willing to take on arguably more risk and longer lead times to sales compared to any other industry -- there's so much human impact that can be made (and money at stake) that even a small dent in the healthcare space represents thousands of lives (and billions of dollars). A company like Google or Apple can make more than just a small dent.
From a macro perspective, the US has an aging population with the Baby Boomer generation entering older adulthood. Older population = greater health needs. Financially, it makes a lot of sense for a large company with vast resources like Google or Apple to make a splash in healthcare. And now's the time to do it.
They also have a distinct advantage over startups when it comes to introducing change from outside the healthcare industry. They can withstand the long sales cycle that it takes to get approvals without needing to balance fundraising in the process. Not to mention their unique ability to reduce the length of those sales cycles. They're more likely to win pilots and scale, and faster, because of their brand recognition -- a key competitive advantage when you're talking about a risk averse space like the healthcare industry. Not to mention, you typically need to get a lot of stakeholders together (providers, payers, patients) and align incentives in order to get anywhere. Large companies have a huge advantage here and can influence change relatively quickly. Healthcare institutions are constantly discussing the need for technological disruption (and have the budget / financial incentives to foot it), but by nature they are highly risk averse to any major changes. Large tech companies are uniquely positioned.
SOURCE: I once worked on a healthcare startup, have been through a healthcare startup incubator program, have friends who are doctors and healthcare administrators, am familiar with healthcare investor thinking, and am connected to a spectrum of healthcare startups (both successful and early stage).
There's a spectrum. On the one hand, you have the notion that tech companies actually have a competitive advantage in attacking health related issues from a data driven (or robotics?) perspective. On the other hand, you have hubris. I think it remains to be seen where on this spectrum SV falls, but I'd say right about here:
I think there's a critical mass of people in power at these companies hitting middle age and being confronted with their own mortality. (And the death of Steve Jobs probably reinforced the same notes in the minds of a lot of people.)
Because IT is stable ? no growth in computers, smartphones are going flat too. Almost anybody has access to wonderful tech and gadgets. No more money selling magic. What's left ? real things like health.
>Why do Apple, Google and major IT companies seem so much interested by our health suddenly ? What are they planning to do with the data ? Just selling it ? (life insurance companies ?)
I'm surprised that posts containing not even outright cynicism, but merely questioning where this data may end up and for what uses, are being downvoted to the extent they are.
If we're simply going to be unquestioning fanboys of Google et al. then why bother opening such topics for discussion? To slap backs and shout a mutual "hurrah"?
This is a wild guess on my part - It might also have to do with the hacker mentality that tends to see the human body as a machine to be tweaked and optimized.
I think it's(health) is a major concern of the Founders as well. You get the money. You get the right girl--sometimes.(A lot of these guys still rely on Hookers--paid in one way or another. You start to eat better--sometimes. You start to
think about what you can't buy; the inevitability if death is the last line of code!
"But I will fix that too?" My own concern for my cancer
risk is two fold--I worry I drank too much in my younger
days, and I didn't spend enough time outside in the sun?
Anyway, I wish Google well. If anyone from Google reads this, I'm tired of using Duckduckgo. I would go back to you
guys--if you didn't track my every movement.
Including my mom in the last 10 years I've lost 4 female members of family to cancer. This product is revolutionary no doubt and I am very excited about it. I believe Google will face an uphill task as there are lots of things to explain to the consumer before taking this full stream.
1. Will these nano particles stay in my blood stream forever or do I have to inject them in my body periodically. What are its side effects?
2. The wristband on my hand communicating with these nano particles in someway connects back to the Google's network and now along with my emails and pics Google is tracking my health and my DNA. I mean I can turn off my phone and not use my email but I can't turn off my body. When combined with the DNA this project has the potential to provide an RFID to each and every human being.
Ignore my ignorance I am not the expert here just curious about all these possibilities.
There’s still a million crazy things that happen with
people, and there’s a long journey to put medicines into
people, and it has to be done in the open because we’re
going to do experiments— people will be wearing these
devices at our Baseline Study.
And:
Yeah. That’s part of the reason we had to talk about this.
There’s a pretty substantial body of patents that describe
what we’re talking about in great detail that will be
publicly noticeable in the next month or so.
Most likely compete. Google excels at organizing information by means of symbolic processing/manipulation. Dog "know-how" is opaque enough to mix well with existing expertise.
Unless they go meta and get in the dog training business, effectively using dogs as black box components in their wider system.
I imagine "killer app" is no longer the understatement when your next wearable actually actively monitors your health like this. I think the privacy concerns can be worked out, and they shouldn't slow down the research.
Seeing the headline, I thought it would be an article monitoring passive signals to calculate risk scores, so I was really happy to see biochemistry. I think Google pouring funds into this kind of research will lead to some awesome advancements. It's easy to imagine a recurring revenue stream from a device like this which adds years to your lifespan. Owning a device like that actually reduces the cost of your life/disability insurance because anything that does go wrong gets discovered earlier with better outcomes. Actually, you could pay for the device out of those savings alone.
It is amazing to think what the feature comparison chart for wearables in the next decade will look like.
Nano-bubbles and particles have been used since a long time to diagnose diseases and enhance the quality of ultrasound analysis (contrast agents). You can also link an antibody on their surface to target them against a particular protein or reveal a zone of interest (e.g. a tumor revealed by a specific biomarker). Nano-bubbles are even use to destroy adjacent tissue on purpose (sonoporation).
Usually such particles are constructed via a mix of lipids and have a very short life time in the blood stream. I wonder how they're going to keep them alive in the blood stream for what seems to be a very long time and their design regarding toxicity.
Reading the story all I can think of is the possibilities. Suspend the particles into and disperse with aerosol in public places and then scan for indicators you want as they walk through or by detectors. You could set it all up to report to individuals anonymously, but the idea of what a future of health care might be should include a system which requires no action on the patients.
The privacy concerns could be immense or moot, but many would trade for the convenience
Sounds pretty elaborate - perhaps if we could just work on a lower cost almost do it yourself access to an MRI or ultrasound detection as well as many other troubles in the body could be detected... But this is health care 7 billion opinions very few solutions beyond reducing pain and cutting stuff
World's largest advertising company developing cancer and heart attack detector. Think of the great AdSense and AdWords lead generation opportunities coming. It's like printing money.
They've generally been quite good at refusing to let advertisers target on sensitive subjects. It's probably a legal minefield in most developed countries, and it'd be a PR nightmare if there were any sort of adverse effects.
"We won’t associate with an individual’s cookie any audiences considered sensitive, such as those based on race, religion, sexual orientation, health, certain financial information, and others."[0]
Marketing, competition, new features, bugs, expoits, evolution. These things could go viral. Literally.
A hard robots.txt equivalent cellular protocol might be needed to protect body parts from the gaze of Grey Google.
I find the idea of potentially handing Google, a firm whose core model is selling ads and generalized user data, the details of my biochemical makeup quite troubling.
Why should an advertising company get access to this data in the first place? What do they intend on doing with it?
Selling us adverts based on a combination of our biochemical data, or the state of our health, coupled with our search terms that might indicate we have concern over one area or another?
Being able to help the medical sales industry target us more efficiently? As in "X user has Y indicators in their health data, therefore they would be a prudent market to advertise Z to"?
Nobody is saying they should. The data is yours, and if you don't get any value from giving access to it, then don't.
My question was: Assuming you get something in return (better health, or longer life, for example), what are the factors you are weighing against it?
Note in particular that I'm not saying there aren't any. I'm just challenging the knee-jerk statement of "my body's bio-chemical data is super private and sensitive so nothing in the world can be worth giving access to it", without any actual argument for it.
https://medium.com/backchannel/were-hoping-to-build-the-tric... What struck me was his optimism that this was really going to happen. Usually researchers are ultra cautious about going out on a limb like that (Yes, he said there was much to do, but read the interview to get his tone.) I think that comes from working at a place like Google X that encourages the big reach.