By Sean Ahn and Maximilian Giers
Unicef has recently been doing a lot to encourage building ideas around wearables for good causes: “Through the Wearables for Good Challenge, UNICEF, ARM and frog, set out to demonstrate how wearable technology can be used to solve some of the most pressing challenges facing children.”
Through initiatives like this, organizations can encourage the development of ideas and start-ups that can make significant impact on specific causes regardless of industry. This challenge is particularly interesting and draws similarities to the Google X Prize challenge that was used as an example in POM class as a company that used innovative re-sequencing. Social impact seems to be a space in which many start-ups struggle to develop and make impact due to the challenge in staying profitable, manifesting a need for more support and an increased supply of bright minds, which need to be encouraged to build on creative ideas for the good and to receive more financial support in order to make significant impact.
One example of an interesting company in this space is Khushi Baby, a participant of Unicef’s Wearables for Good Challenge.
Social Impact
Khushi Baby combines mobile health, wearable tech, and cloud computing to enable underprivileged mothers and children receive more effective healthcare. They do this by building very affordable necklaces (less than $1) that store medical records that can be accessed through their mobile app. The following inspiring video provides an overview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaYcXA3g_xI
The fact that this wearable tech means a lot more than just a medical record holder to these families interviewed in the video validates that this technology is really addressing a need and Khushi Baby has the opportunity to scale this product to impact even more lives around the world. This technology has the potential to not only benefit the underprivileged in India but also anyone that needs an easy, safe, and effective way to store medical records.
Wearable Technology in Hospitals
Whether you are a doctor providing care in underprivileged communities or a doctor in an established hospital, your mission is to provide effective care to your patients. Currently, most doctors are limited to accessing a familiar patient’s past record and asking the patient for an accurate description of his or her conditions. What about new patients that do not have medical records? Or patients with medical records that are not easy to understand due to differences in format, language, or system?
This technology has the opportunity to make a huge impact on the risk associated with medical information and every stakeholder that needs it. Everyone including patients, doctors, pharmacists, and even insurance companies (lawyers in the US) can all utilize one platform for medical record sharing and can easily access information in their own language on one format, one system. Doctors providing treatment based on accurate information can enhance the level of quality and effectiveness of care.
What it means to us?
How about us? Since the majority of us at INSEAD have lived in more than one country, many of us have the experience seeing doctors other than your family doctor. In order for doctors to give effective treatment, they need to know exactly the what, when, and how of the patient’s medical history.
Even healthy individual face the need for easy access to medical records every once in a while. For example Sean: I am currently going through the registration process for the Wharton Exchange and they are requiring me to submit my shot record. I can probably try to dig it up somewhere in my parent’s garage or call my old doctor after I track him down, but it would make my life much easier if I had access to a digital copy stored on the cloud.
What’s next?
Whether you are a world traveler seeing doctors in different countries or a healthy individual that just needs the convenience of storing and accessing medical records, we all can find a need for Khushi Baby’s technology. We may not need the necklace or wearable device, but the cloud and mobile technology would really help. Since Khushi Baby already has the mobile and cloud platform, they have a good opportunity to expand by optimizing the product for regular customers to use. If they are successful and have significant scale, they can further leverage medical data to be used for research and development in medical, pharmaceutical, and insurance companies.
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Sean Ahn & Maxi Giers
Sources:
- Unicef Wearable for Good Challenge: http://wearablesforgood.com/about/
- Khushi Baby: http://www.khushibaby.org/
- Wearable in Social Impact: http://emberify.com/blog/understanding-the-social-impact-of-wearables/
There is definitely a need to improve medical information accessibility & management. The main showstopper that I’ve heard so far is data security issues. How does Khusi Baby address this?
Building on the point Loes raised I would also be curious to learn more about the data security issues: What happens if the necklace gets lost? Can everyone access it or does it use some sort of password/access code? And can every doctor access all the data on the necklace? These are the kind of questions I think need to be addressed eventually (probably they already have…)
This is very interesting and it makes a lot of sense given the limited literacy and access to healthcare in the rural depths of India. One way to ensure that data doesn’t get lost and links to the identity of the child is by integrating this technology with the government systems. AADHAAR which is an initiative of the government of India to provide a unique identification to every citizen can be integrated well with Khushi Baby. This will also enable technology like this to be scaled further.
I think that this concept makes sense in terms of consolidating information and making the overall process for medical patients and their stakeholders more convenient and stream-lined. I do however have some concerns about how this may impact privacy? The database would be very complex. For instance, in the US, I’m sure every state has different laws on who can access what records, etc. How will this database ensure that the proper stakeholders are accessing this information? How will the database be designed in order to accommodate the huge complex number of logic and rules that would need to be built into this to apply to the US and the rest of the world?
Additionally, what about information stored on chips that are injected into you? Instead of the necklace? that would solve the risks involved if the necklace were stolen?
Building on the previous comments, if privacy & security problems can be solved (perhaps with small chips in our body) and the system can become internationally accepted, it can bring also a huge benefits in our global society, where people traveling / working / living in different countries and changing frequently need to repeat often the same kind of exams for work and study visas…