Google"s DeepMind plans bitcoin-style health record tracking for hospitals

Google’s AI-powered health tech subsidiary, DeepMind Health, is planning to use a new technology loosely based on bitcoin to let hospitals, the NHS and eventually even patients track what happens to personal data in real-time.

Dubbed “Verifiable Data Audit”, the plan is to create a special digital ledger that automatically records every interaction with patient data in a cryptographically verifiable manner. This means any changes to, or access of, the data would be visible.

DeepMind has been working in partnership with London’s Royal Free Hospital to develop kidney monitoring software called Streams and has faced criticism from patient groups for what they claim are overly broad data sharing agreements. Critics fear that the data sharing has the potential to give DeepMind, and thus Google, too much power over the NHS.

In a blogpost, DeepMind co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, and head of security and transparency, Ben Laurie, use an example relating to the Royal Free Hospital partnership to explain how the system will work. “[An] entry will record the fact that a particular piece of data has been used, and also the reason why, for example, that blood test data was checked against the NHS national algorithm to detect possible acute kidney injury,” they write.

Suleyman says that development on the data audit proposal began long before the launch of Streams, when Laurie, the co-creator of the widely-used Apache server software, was hired by DeepMind. “This project has been brewing since before we started DeepMind Health,” he told the Guardian, “but it does add another layer of transparency.

“Our mission is absolutely central, and a core part of that is figuring out how we can do a better job of building trust. Transparency and better control of data is what will build trust in the long term.” Suleyman pointed to a number of efforts DeepMind has already undertaken in an attempt to build that trust, from its founding membership of the industry group Partnership on AI to its creation of a board of independent reviewers for DeepMind Health, but argued the technical methods being proposed by the firm provide the “other half” of the equation.

Nicola Perrin, the head of the Wellcome Trust’s “Understanding Patient Data” taskforce, welcomed the verifiable data audit concept. “There are a lot of calls for a robust audit trail to be able to track exactly what happens to personal data, and particularly to be able to check how data is used once it leaves a hospital or NHS Digital. DeepMind are suggesting using technology to help deliver that audit trail, in a way that should be much more secure than anything we have seen before.”

Perrin said the approach could help address DeepMind’s challenge of winning over the public. “One of the main criticisms about DeepMind’s collaboration with the Royal Free was the difficulty of distinguishing between uses of data for care and for research. This type of approach could help address that challenge, and suggests they are trying to respond to the concerns.

“Technological solutions won’t be the only answer, but I think will form an important part of developing trustworthy systems that give people more confidence about how data is used.”

The systems at work are loosely related to the cryptocurrency bitcoin, and the blockchain technology that underpins it. DeepMind says: “Like blockchain, the ledger will be append-only, so once a record of data use is added, it can’t later be erased. And like blockchain, the ledger will make it possible for third parties to verify that nobody has tampered with any of the entries.”

Laurie downplays the similarities. “I can’t stop people from calling it blockchain related,” he said, but he described blockchains in general as “incredibly wasteful” in the way they go about ensuring data integrity: the technology involves blockchain participants burning astronomical amounts of energy – by some estimates as much as the nation of Cyprus – in an effort to ensure that a decentralised ledger can’t be monopolised by any one group.

DeepMind argues that health data, unlike a cryptocurrency, doesn’t need to be decentralised – Laurie says at most it needs to be “federated” between a small group of healthcare providers and data processors – so the wasteful elements of blockchain technology need not be imported over. Instead, the data audit system uses a mathematical function called a Merkle tree, which allows the entire history of the data to be represented by a relatively small record, yet one which instantly shows any attempt to rewrite history.

Although not technologically complete yet, DeepMind already has high hopes for the proposal, which it would like to see form the basis of a new model for data storage and logging in the NHS overall, and potentially even outside healthcare altogether. Right now, says Suleyman, “It’s really difficult for people to know where data has moved, when, and under which authorised policy. Introducing a light of transparency under this process I think will be very useful to data controllers, so they can verify where their processes have used or moved or accessed data.

“That’s going to add technical proof to the governance transparency that’s already in place. The point is to turn that regulation into a technical proof.”

In the long-run, Suleyman says, the audit system could be expanded so that patients can have direct oversight over how and where their data has been used. But such a system would come a long time in the future, once concerns over how to secure access have been solved.

Google"s DeepMind plans bitcoin-style health record tracking for hospitals

MyFitnessPal Starts Tracking Methods To Expand The World"s Biggest Nutrition Database

Latest hype about healthcare tech has been more than wearable fitness trackers, but an arguably much more impactful way to be healthful and shed fat is to track eating habits, something you can already do with a smartphone alone. MyFitnessPal, one of the initial mobile apps to track foods intake, is set to broaden its support to track activity too, marking a direct challenge to the software supplied by wearable products like Fitbit and Jawbone and an attempt to produce 1 of the first, complete windows into a person’s health.

MyFitnessPal says it will track fitness action via a feature referred to as Actions, and while the attribute will sync with information that comes in from wearable products like the Fitbit and Jawbone UP, it will also track steps directly by means of the iPhone 5S. The app is taking advantage of the phone’s M7 chip, which is powerful and effective adequate to continuously track action without having draining the phone’s battery.

MyFitnessPal’s founder and CEO Mike Lee, who wears a black Fitbit Flex on his wrist, hopes to make activity monitoring on his app operate with other smartphones too. He notes the obvious overlap of his app with Fitbit’s, which also tracks nutrition intake, but adds that “a good deal of people favor ours. Our consumers want to be capable to see all that information inside of our app.”

Lee has spent the final final 9 years creating up an huge sum of data based on what his much more-than 50 million registered customers contribute to the app. “We have the largest database that is ever existed of what men and women eat,” says Lee. “There’s never ever been one thing like this.”

Well being care companies and researchers have naturally come knocking at his door in a bid to gain accessibility to that data, but Lee claims to be “very protective” of it and is holding back for now. Whilst other fitness apps have open APIs for information sharing, MyFitnessPal’s is private and demands a formal partnership for that data to be unlocked.

There is an argument that as smartphones develop far more sophisticated sensors like the Samsung Galaxy S5’s finger-print sensor and heart price check, they’ll send wearable fitness trackers like the Fitbit towards obsolescence. Smartphones did the identical for in-auto navigation, following all, following the short-lived reputation of TomToms and Garmins.

Lee says it’s as well early to make a bet on form factors both way, since men and women really do not often have their phones on their bodies, and wearables have the advantage of sensors that could, more and more, measure issues like heartbeat and sweat articles at all occasions.

“The sum of information you have available to you is going to grow exponentially,” he adds. “What’s fascinating is what you can do with that data in the long term.”

Over time, Lee hopes to find a spot for his support in the healthcare area. Fitness apps and wearable units usually fit into the so-called consumerization of well being care trend, exactly where providers hope to consider a bite out of the $ two.3 trillion overall health care industry and shell out a position in that prolonged span of time amongst doctor’s visits.

Lee sees his support as an “incredibly powerful” way to bridge the data gap among consumers and their overall health care companies. A future services that ties in with healthcare “would have to be permission primarily based,” he adds, but such functions are already being mapped out and MyFitnessPal has an API that allows users to connect to specific healthcare suppliers. “We’d be interested in including a health-related companion,” he says.

That could be 1 likely route to creating money. For now, MyFitnessPal derives revenue totally from marketing ad room on its app with the help of mobile ad networks. The startup, which was bootstrapped for most of its existence till an $ 18 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins last year, was actually profitable for a even though, Lee says. Nonetheless investments in hiring for roles like data science to boost its analytics offerings, have pushed it into the red more not too long ago.

Lee began MyFitnessPal nine years ago as a desktop app when he and his then-fiancee were striving to shed a few pounds ahead of their beach wedding ceremony. When his trainer told him to start counting his calories on paper, Lee created a world wide web application that permitted him to do it on a personal computer alternatively. The services grew to become an iPhone app in early 2009.

These days it’s 1 of many cost-free, excess weight-reduction apps that have challenged paid-for dieting stalwarts like Jenny Craig and Fat Watchers, the two of whom have suffered share drops in excess of the last year or so as a result.

A lot of of these cost-free apps, like MyFitnessPal, RunKeeper and Runtastic, cross reference information with 1 an additional via open APIs to support them scale up. More than time however, some might select to quit sharing data in a bid to create single platforms that end users go to for a holistic see of their overall health and activity. This looks to be the street MyFitnessPal is going down with its private API and now, the inclusion of steps tracking.

The app’s announcement is also interestingly timed, coming a day right after Facebook unveiled the new behind-the-scenes network that connects mobile apps by means of a user’s Facebook ID. With it, users will soon be in a position to log into apps “anonymously.”

The thought is that this will motivate more people to use Facebook as an identifier amongst third-celebration providers.

For an app like MyFitnessPal which may at some point partner up with healthcare providers, a ubiquitous ID program like Facebook’s could make that simpler. But Facebook and MyFitnessPal will want to obtain scale, and far more importantly the believe in, of users to consider that following stage.

MyFitnessPal Starts Tracking Methods To Expand The World"s Biggest Nutrition Database