Powering MoveUP with PHIsion
The name MoveUP doesn’t refer to moving people or even stuff, it refers to this idea that we might evolve as a s ociety by improving how we connect. We believe that intelligently designing and implementing a platform that allows us to live together cooperatively could facilitate reaching our maximum unified potential.
A wise friend recently pointed out that my blog is linked to the MoveUP’s Facebook page and suggested that mixing politics and business may not be a good plan. This is not the first excellent advice that I have chosen to ignore, however the intention of all of this writing is to be the mission statement for the company we are building. The hope is that we will look back and see the philosophy that shaped our work as opposed to a marketing statement crafted post-production to try to instill faith in a customer base. Everything that has influenced how we got where we are today and our path to the end goal is here.
MoveUP didn’t actually start as a transportation solution, it started as an individualized solution for connections. Connections are valuable. They are powerful. Enabling people to make connections on their own terms for their own benefit, that’s MoveUP. It just so happens that the value of connections extends to transportation, where a person might connect with someone who is able to get that someone – or someone else or even something – someplace else.
The name MoveUP doesn’t refer to moving people or even stuff, it refers to this idea that we might evolve as a society by improving how we connect. We believe that intelligently designing and implementing a platform that allows us to live together cooperatively could facilitate reaching our maximum unified potential.
To illustrate this, I want to introduce the next phase of MoveUP’s development: PHISion.
PHISion is a Personal Health Information Solution. It is a way for you to collect and manage various data that might be important to your health, all completely controlled by you. It also allows you to connect this data to whomever you wish- family, friends, or maybe a doctor – on your terms, and with the utmost in security.
This is far from the first health app, but it is completely different because it was designed from the beginning to enable you to live better on your terms. Every other system was designed from the beginning to have some control over your data, because that data – and the ability to connect it to other things or share it with other people – that has value. We will let you be the one to realize that value.
Like every component in MoveUP, PHISion’s functionality will expand over time, but its core components are: weight, resting heart rate, and gps location history.
Today, the discussion of weight is consumed with obesity, but the untapped potential is monitoring for unintended weight loss. Most lung cancer patients present with unintended weight loss, and other types of cancer may do the same. No, unintended weight loss does not mean someone has cancer, but in today’s society, losing weight without trying raises a red flag. PHISion will allow you to easily store your weight securely where only you can access it. Meanwhile, an algorithm steadily monitors how you are doing and can alert you if it appears there could be a problem. How that works – an alert just for you, or maybe a simple message to a loved one or your doctor, or maybe a combination depending on the level of concern – that’s completely up to you. Note that the actual data – how much you weigh – is not important (nor is data like your address or SSN). It’s just a screen to safely and easily help catch potentially serious diseases a bit earlier.
Resting heart rate has similar potential, because unexplained increases can indicate an underlying health problem like evolving anemia or poor management of a chronic disease like diabetes. Resting heart rate is like an engine at idle and can be measured by most health trackers. The data can be stored securely, and a similar algorithm can initiate a very similar alert with the same flexibility, security, and individual control.
Though a potentially powerful tool, storing historical gps data – tracking your location – is a very sensitive discussion that raises numerous ethical issues concerning privacy. PHISion eliminates those worries by giving you complete control over your data in such a way that no one can access it without your consent. Furthermore, it allows you to share that data in a deidentified form on your terms. For example, allowing researchers to see if there is overlap in location between one person with a disease as compared to other people with the same disease can unlock patterns of spread or contributing factors that can to effective strategies of prevention or even management. Notice that it doesn’t matter who the people are – the data can be stripped of names and other sensitive information – it is simply a matter of connecting the dots to the diagnosis.
There are important considerations for all of this, and PHISion will walk you through things you may not have thought about, like how to read a consent form for a research study before turning over your potentially sensitive information. A gps data file can never be truly de-identified because it will include information like your home and work that someone could use to figure out who you are. That means you want to be careful about who you share this information with, what they intend to do with it, and what assurances they can provide you that you and your information will stay safe. These are the types of issues a medical research team is required to manage, but industry often lacks this level of oversight. PHISion and MoveUP were envisioned to help you understand how to get the most out of what you have with unmatched safety.
As usual, I made myself the test subject and have been tracking my own weight and resting heart rate for several years. I wanted to evaluate the overall cost and difficulty, because it doesn’t matter how powerful a tool is if no one will use it or many can’t afford it. And these three metrics are just the beginning: the underlying architecture will allow for you to manage anything related to your health, from medical records to laboratory data, even social history that updates in real time using secure connections to other family members.
Because all of this was integral to the fundamental intent, it all comes down to connections: connections to what is important to you, to who is important to you, to the what’s and where’s and when’s that are important to you. It’s all designed so that we can MoveUP.