Ask YC: This is our tech, how can we make this into a product that people want?
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
I'm very surprised by this - it strikes me that I'd expect it to be hard to tell from such data that it wasn't a stomach upset, tiredness, onset of disease or simply a heavy cold. Indeed 90% sounds like it might be higher than correct identification via an interview with a doctor.
>[...] in Rwanda between 2006 and 2009. He saw a clear reduction in people's movement, which may have been due to the disease. But the outbreak was caused by floods, which also limited mobility. Distinguishing between the two possible causes on the basis of phone data alone was impossible, he says.
Makes me the 90% figure highly suspect.
That aside I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to have a smart phone app that gives you epidemiology info in return for entering your health status for the day. To encourage continued use a sort of diary function and stats could be added. Wouldn't this be more predictive than monitoring movement, and less intrusive?
The actual accuracy is between 60-90%, depending on clusters of symptoms, and apparently that was stripped somewhere during editing. Oh well.
60% really means very little if it's a binary choice - flu or no. You'll be right 50% of the times no mater what.
What? Just because something is binary doesn't mean it happens half the time.
There is a lot more sophistication we can add (e.g. markov properties), these are almost first-order results.
Nonetheless important to validate with other populations. That would be a big part of testing any product.
So build an enterprise level system and sell it to individual universities. The school installs your application on each student's phone and receive an aggregate view of anonymous data through a back-end interface. This could give them a real-time look of how the infection is spreading through their community and allow them to be far more responsive in prevention measures. What if they could receive warning that the 3rd floor of Residence Hall A had signs of a potential outbreak? Just bring in those students for a preemptive checkup and stop the bug dead in its tracks.
Of course there is a boat load of legal and privacy issues to sort out for this type of intrusive monitoring. Nothing that couldn't be overcome I don't think (IANAL). I know that my school installs an app on all of our athlete's Facebook accounts for monitoring purposes so this isn't too far off from that.
Good luck with whatever path you choose! I'm always open to discussing startup strategy so feel free to drop me a line.
In my experience, the best information businesses are founded on a core of primary research - data that you find/generate that no one else has. Once you build that database, you build the products. You might be surprised, but here's what many information products look like - I'm a fan of doing it in this order:
1. A big honking CSV file of the primary data. For customers that have their own models, which your early adopters will likely have. Ours did.
2. A CSV file of derivative analytics (the output of your prediction tools perhaps?). For customers who want your algorithmic take on the underlying data.
3. Reports (manually written). People buy your analysis of the data. We found a majority of the potential market doesn't want Tools or data files (even if they're Wall Street "quants"). They just want answers - and by virtue of having the data, you're an instant expert. Reports have the nice benefit of being A) tangible B) easy to consume and C) subscribe-able (repeat revenue!) They have a bonus of being delicious chum for the media sharks.
4. Reports (automated, for scale). Subscribers get the latest insights each week, month, etc. Best not to automate until you see which of #3 are most popular.
5. Now come the technology Tools. #3 and #4 above will be excellent test beds for your prediction tools. Doing it in this order, you won't have to build any front end applications until you understand what predictions people pay for. One way to build a tools-based product line is to give the tech away for free and have the customer subscribe to the latest data.
You might also find that a great consumer-facing website is powerful for the information business. We don't have those skills in our company, but have found that when we pull it off even a little, institutional buyers begin as personal, individual consumers. A great consumer facing site/app is a perfect way to reach them.
rock on.
As others mentioned, making it a standard part of all phones might be something you could sell to governments, particularly in areas where flu frequently becomes epidemic.
It's a public health issue, which isn't usually an extremely easy to go-to-market area, I would think. Since it doesn't cure people of the flu, and doesn't help prevent it in any particular individual, it has nearly zero market value for any individual. I wouldn't even have a reason to install it for free...what good would it do me?
Is there some element of your research and tech that can be generalized to spot other kinds of trends? Trendspotting is extremely valuable, particularly to marketers...Google would probably acquire a company that can effectively trendspot from mobile devices, and even if they didn't, a mobile ad platform with trendspotting would be incredibly lucrative.
For that particular application, its better to use custom body-worn hardware (e.g. fitbit).
Regarding spotting trends in face-to-face networks, we've done similar analysis political opinions during the 2008 election campaign.
Results here: http://web.media.mit.edu/~anmol/political-2.pdf
In fact, I would broaden the scope a bit: make it like the "Emergency Broadcast System" for phones, only two-way.
Lots of privacy implications and the carriers and handset manufacturers would hate it, but I can certainly see it doing long term good.
Now that I think about it, I imagine most young people use Facebook messages/wall posts more than phone calls and texts.
Or perhaps a browser plugin that anonymously reports browsing habits.
You might see if this could get funded as a means to help seriously at risk populations reduce their risk, spot problems at an earlier stage and so on.
I have a form of cystic fibrosis, as does my 23 year old son. We have gotten a great deal healthier than doctors claim is possible largely by making dietary and lifestyle changes to protect us from illness, rather than waiting until we are ill and loading up on drugs. I'm extremely controversial in the CF community. But if you had funding from some "kosher" organization (unlike me -- I'm just some loudmouthed individual speaking from firsthand experience...aka "fruitcake"), well, there is real potential to do real good here, not just for the individual quality of life but also the economy: By my estimation, the 30,000 or so people with CF in the US consume roughly $3billion+ annually (edit: I mean in medical care -- doctors visits, drugs, hospitalizations), most of which does not come out of their pockets. Most of it comes from insurance, state aid, federal aid, charities, and even medical write-offs when patients who are routinely deathly ill simply can't pay. I don't know how to tap into that $3 billion, but it is in someone's best interest monetarily (if nothing else) to help this population (and others like it) stay healthier. And I know it is an achievable goal because I do it every day. I just don't know how to adequately explain to other people how to do what I do.
I hope this goes somewhere. I am excited to see something like this. It fits nicely with my views on what works, health-wise.
Best of luck.
My intuition is that being able to quantify and visualize 'quality-of-life' automatically, will help support diet and lifestyle changes.
What kind of features/UI would you like to see in such a tool? Would it be better is this was generic (e.g. like Facebook), or something specifically for patients with CF?
The CF market per se is pretty small. I wouldn't look to customize it specifically for them. I also think that "good practices" generalize. If you can come up with some parameters that work well with vulnerable populations, it should work regardless of their specific issue.
Features that might be nice: A text message "alert" when early indicators are noticed and perhaps a means for the customer to put in custom "prompts" so that, whatever their medical condition, they can self-remind (for example: that they might have forgotten to take a particular medication). People with medical conditions often become "forgetful" as their condition starts heading into a downward spiral and the sicker they get, the harder it gets to think about what they most need to do to stop the downward spiral. A reminder to do the right things and an alert that their patterns suggest they might be in need of extra care could well be the stitch in time that saves nine.
Questions
1. How fast can you spot a trend? 2. How is the tracking working? 3. How precise is it.
I could imagine traffic would be a good area to look into.
I've just been away in the Midlands (UK) and used Google Maps on a mobile for the first time. The triangulation of position was only accurate to about 1500m radius and then would switch between positions quite often. Such info would look much like a user that was moving quite a lot - I expect it could be filtered out but this sort precision (and lack of accuracy) appears common in the UK.
By precise, do you mean precision versus recall? The tradeoff depends on what you want to do with the inferences. If you send the analysis to say a nurse or family member (i.e., human in the loop, which we think is the right approach) then recall should be optimized.
BTW, small world, my SO knows Eagle :P
If you have particular insight on any SBIR proposals related to our work, do share. Thanks!
ps. yes, Nathan is a friend.
If you want to make something businesses want to pay for, see if the same predictive models work for forecasting product demand and other economic activity. What is the effect of a movie release on patterns of communication and movement? Can profiles be (semi-anonymously) correlated with other tweets/purchases, so you know that learning about a certain product, or buying it, changes behavior in some way?