Public Health, Personal Data

PUBLIC HEALTH, PERSONAL DATA

Speakers: Kevin Patrick, MD, MS, Professor, Family and Preventive Medicine, UC San Diego
Matthew Bietz, PhD, Assistant Project Scientist, Informatics Department, UC Irvine
Date: Friday, November 7, 2014
Time: 3:00 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.
Location: 6011 Donald Bren Hall

Individuals are tracking a variety of health-related data via a growing number of wearable devices and smartphone apps. More and more data relevant to health are also being captured passively as people communicate with one another on social networks, shop, work, or do any number of activities that leave “digital footprints.” Self-tracking data can provide better measures of everyday behavior and lifestyle and can fill in gaps in more traditional clinical or public health data collection, giving us a more complete picture of health and human activity. In this talk, we will discuss how new forms of personal data are transforming the ways we understand human health. Making use of personal data for the public good requires addressing a number of technical, social, and scientific challenges, including developing new methods of analysis, new mechanisms for data sharing, and appropriate privacy and consent frameworks. We will discuss how we are addressing these challenges in our new Health Data Exploration project, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Bios:

Dr. Patrick is Professor of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of California, San Diego and Director of the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems at the Qualcomm Institute/Calit2. He is Director of the Health Data Exploration project of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). He served as Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine from 1994-2013, and has served on the Secretary’s Council for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Armed Forces Epidemiology Board. His research, supported by the NIH, NSF, CDC, and RWJF, explores how to use mobile, home and social technologies to measure and improve the health of individuals and populations.

Dr. Bietz (Assistant Project Scientist, University of California, Irvine) received his Ph.D. in Information from the University of Michigan in 2008. He is Lead Co-Investigator on the Robert Wood Johnson-funded Health Data Exploration project. He has studied collaboration, data sharing, and the development of cyberinfrastructure in various scientific and engineering fields including HIV/AIDS research, genomics, oceanography, astronomy, software engineering, and planetary science. A primary research interest is understanding the negotiation and alignment work necessary to support large-scale data sharing.