Sunday, April 17, 2011

A Leading Edge Forum Grant Proposal - Personal Health Graphs

I wrote this today knowing my chances of winning a LEF Grant again but actually getting the 400 hours to do it would be slim to zero because of my utilization rate. Please tell me what you think anyway.

Provide a short description of the grant request.

Create an immersive, interactive and intermodal 100-yr baseline of human health data, information and knowledge generated from medical devices, applications, and actors for personal health management—planning, decision support, monitoring and archiving.

Part 1  General Description

I will synthesize an interactive, human, health-data cycle of 100 years (as a baseline) for the sake of strategic communications by the World Health Organization to people managing the health outcomes of their unborn, themselves and/or their elders, alive and dead. Web 2.0 and 3.0 standards are involved in modeling a technology stack I think will enable people to interact with their digital human model, which forms the basis for planning, monitoring and archiving their structured and unstructured health data and metadata.

First, my concept of a health-data graph does not exist in the public domain; at least after searching one for two years. My health-data graph embodies the terms and concepts of human anatomy, physiology (pathology) and psychology (psychiatry) at all time scales, spatial dimensions and semantic variants. Second, I have not found a health IT professional who thinks, speaks or works with a health application that is intrinsically comprehensive, unified, integrative, and/or enduring (i.e., ~3.2 billion sec life-death baseline) with a 3D anthropomorphic user interface derived from an individual’s health data and personally digital human model. My work is unique because it will architect such a graph and interface, and innovative because it proffers an user experience from fertilization through postmortem disposition.

The innovation continues with a proposal for a Human Simulation international standard to complement the Human Animation ISO standard for the UI architecture. I will diagram and describe a personalized digital human model simulated in a cloud while the 3D human health IT app runs locally (e.g. iPad2).

Part 2  Value

Managing one's health more like one's wealth is compelling. The data [Bytes], energies [kWh], monies [USD], efforts [staff-hrs], and materiel [Global Trade Item Number] usage and consumption during a vivacious 100-yr life and postmortem disposition is overwhelming to ponder. My interface minimizes hassles of accounting and bookkeeping yet maximizes chances to plan wisely, make healthful decisions, monitor my health, and understand my health history. I have looked, asked, and searched for the last 2 years for someone with my mindset let alone a vendor with a solution, both to no avail. Going to market with a personalized 3D human UI, comprehensive data model, unified communications between patient, payers and providers, and integrative health IT services is worth pursuing.

I think such a health IT solution meets the criteria for a Blue Ocean—creates new demand in an uncontested market space. If you agree, then the business value is self explanatory. Nonetheless, the health IT market is a Red Ocean of health and medical record solutions primarily for the payers and providers and that is the problem. My concept assimilates xH/MRs, modeling, monitoring and planning of health events and states based on germane bodies of knowledge, devices, simulations, and personal desires.

My business concept is to disrupt the perception that we have to manage our health cycle with the limited services from treatment & training facilities, specialists’ offices, payers’ portals, disease centers, sports clinics, pharmaceutical laboratories, etc.. People’s health data should be logically organized in one data store with a disaster recovery site, secure as their protectively skinned bodies, searchable as fast as their memory-filled brains, and accessible as their autonomic functions preserving their lives. This concept as a type of graphing technology applied to health management that could create a demand in an uncontested marketplace. United States’ health data and metadata laws favor providers in terms of ownership. As a result, our data stewardship is fragmented, segmented, and compartmented by payers and providers. My concept humanizes health management with your anthropomorphic interface to your health cycle.

Part 3  Leverage

This idea will benefit the FCP by delivering the NPS Health IT Center of Excellence a basis for mobile presentations that appeal to the military and civil health systems because it amongst the other integrative features out shines the virtual lifetime electronic record paradigm they consider leading edge.

No Health IT Center of Excellence has advertised or revealed a service offering that has an architecture designed to the longevity of to be centenarians born this century. I’ve talked to and/or read about Healthcare Centers of Excellence (or equivalent) at IBM, Intel, Intersystems, Oracle, Google, Microsoft, et al via proxy or directly about this idea and they didn’t reveal anything comparable. Having a few male and female prototypical 100-yr health graphs will be a first. FCP will distinguish itself with compelling storylines; each derived from one of the PHGs I imply will showcase our mastery of integrating systems with service oriented architecture and cloud computing. Overall, CSC will benefit by being first to go direct to humans with cogent life stories and enduring solutions for lifelong Health Management.

Presenting plausible and probable 100-yr life stories of males and females from their health graphs and IT perspectives are the values this idea helps CSC bring to the Health IT marketplace. My fruitless search for such stories in governments, corporations and health professionals for the last 2 years left digital traces of my idea in the heads of those willing to hear and read me out; and many thought my pursuit is noble. You have to believe interacting with such graphs, models, simulators, and applications with your naked, virtual self augmented with traditional GUIs are as valuable as the fanciest financial GUIs, guides, handbooks, etc. in wealth management. And the costs of health data, models, simulations, applications, and services are part of a personal health graph as metadata.

Part 4  Approach

I will take a systems thinking (ST) approach to carry out my grant work—architect a personal health graph (PHG). I will use the tenets of ST: interdependence, holism, goal seeking, I/O, entropy, regulation, hierarchy, differentiation, equifinality, and multifinality to define the scope of the PHG. As complex, convoluted and compounded a 100-year human health graph might be, the systems thinking approach was chosen to simplify health management for the human with the health to manage by optimizing the user’s experience (i.e., intuitive interfaces, secure collaboration, etc.) and system’s costs (i.e., energy consumption, data volume/transfer, form factor, etc.).

My plan has me using (a 30-day trial version of) Enterprise Architect with SysML technology (all 13 diagrams) to graph a female and male master data model of health (alive and dead) to digital human models, medical devices, health actors, and health IT & services. My plan has me using the X3D Edit (freeware) to encode Anthropomorphic User Interface prototypes in the ISO/IEC FCD 19774 Humanoid Animation standard.

There are ten major milestones: 1) compile a human health Master Data Model 2) compile a catalog of medical device types 3) compile a human health services catalog 4) compile a human health actor roster 5) model the PHG structure and behavior with 13 SysML diagrams 6) enumerate the gaps and shortfalls of the Humanoid Animation standard to implement an anthropomorphic user interface 7) encode three H-Anim scenegraphs 8) review no fewer than two technologies to implement the PHG 9) write a 10-episode health story for male and female PHG users and 10) present the grant using EA and H-Anim embedded in a PowerPoint presentation.

My plan’s schedule has approximately one week between milestones.

Part 5  Outcome

I will learn to appreciate the enormity of baselining and benchmarking over a century for human health management. I will learn why no international NGO, government, corporation or individual has composed a PHG or specified one for all to see, sell and/or solicit. I will learn the difficulty of creating and sustaining a century-long behavior pattern for a data structure that will change 10 times over during that century. I will learn about techniques and principles for visualizing human health data, information and knowledge to support health goal setting, healthful decisions (e.g., eating and exercising), health monitoring, picking health professionals, and health assessments based on mind, body and spirit data in one’s PHG. I will learn what cumulative data volumes, exchanges, and formats could be for male and female centenarians. I might learn the energy consumption, financial costs, labor and materiel associated with a well-kept PHG.

I will deliver: 1) draft PHG architecture in SysML format 2) three H-Anim standard formatted animations of male and female health maintenance episodes 3) a 10-episode (~30,000 words) user story for a female and a male centenarian who’s PHG coexisted with them from their fertilization through post-mortem disposition and 4) a PowerPoint presentation of the compilations (i.e., actors, devices, BOK, food & medicine, and services) necessary to model a PHG in SysML.

Part 6  Additional Information

This grant proposal is a refinement (i.e., smaller scope and clearer purpose) of my winning 2008 LEF Grant proposal I did not get the time off to execute. I have been leisurely investigating this topic herein since 2008 and think activities like the NASA’s Digital Astronaut, Digital Human Modelling, Virtual Physiological Human, Virtual Autopsy, Visible Body, Personal Health Software, DARPA’s Virtual Solider Project, Virtual Patients Group Consortium, Virtual Family, and X3D/H-Anim are the giants’ shoulders necessary to accomplish this grant in fewer than 400 hours. My recent work with the NPS Healthcare CoE allowed me to consume a lot more health IT content (e.g., Microsoft Health Services Group’s Amalga Unified Intelligence System training). Not even CSC’s 2010 The Future of Healthcare: It’s Health then Care LEF Report referenced 100-Year human health baselines or benchmarks as a springboard for discussing health IT products.

Please remember the PHG is a data structure that enables health IT to assist users with defining and displaying their health goals and planning behaviors to achieve them (i.e., wellness to world-class athleticism, staying well, and/or illness to good enough to return to work).
Clearly, this topic is germane to everyone reading this proposal so I ask that you consider the irony of how little health data there might be associated with those who live to be at least 100-yo (my baseline lifespan). I have not surveyed gerontologists about their patients’ health records so I am guessing centenarians generate fewer data per unit time, on average, than those who died younger than 100-yo. Moreover, I ask you remember this PHG is about total health management meaning data generation, capture, transformation, exchange, etc. form six degrees of freedom 1) receiving health services 2) using medical/health devices (e.g., heart implants to thermometers) 3) food & drink and medicinal intakes 4) emotional, mental and physical exertions 5) beginnings (e.g., fertilization or illness) and 6) endings (e.g., final disposition or illness).

Consider the millions of pages written and source lines of code compiled in the wealth management domain for legal and natural persons when thinking about my concept of a PHG. One could ask, why not a personal wealth graph, right? Absolutely! So when I came across The 100-Year Wealth Management Plan by Howard M. Weiss, I asked myself, where is The 100-Year Health Management Plan with software license and subscription?!?

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Executive Summary - Opening paragraph candidate #1

LifeGraphs Incorporated is a S corporation with its headquarters in Southeast Washington, DC and entirely owned by William and Tracy Glascoe. The company was founded in 2012 and has received no outsided investments. LifeGraphs sell three software titles and complementary services that command impressive market share in the public, private and consumer sectors. William and Tracy are eager to take the company to the next level achieving 1% per year adoption in each sector of the US market and 0.1% per year in all foreign markets. The 2010 US Census determined there are 250 million natural persons (above the poverty line) in the US and its territories. The US Chamber of commerce estimates the 2010 legal person (non-governmental, non-natural persons) population to be 30 million. There are 9,000 governmental entities in the Federal, Tribal, State and local governments as of 31 Dec 2010. The theoretical market size for lifegraphs when non-US natural and legal persons above the normalized poverty line are included is approximately 4 billion as of 2010. Roughly 20% of the natural person world population will never be lifegraph customers because they live in poverty. The strategic goal is 4 billion lifegraphers by 2112 with annual revenues toppling $400B (2012 dollars; $9.095T 2112 dollars est.).

Friday, December 18, 2009

Think Piece draft text - what do you think?

Life is continuous, complex and complicated with the clutter of property and personal relationships in stressing environments. This think piece is written to express the features of a killer (actually keeper) application incorporating a vision of information management and control for the lifetime of legal persons lasting at least a century. A century is composed of 36,525 days or 876,000 hours or 52,596,000 minutes or 3,155,760,000 seconds. The motivation to write this is to galvanize resources to invent, innovate, produce, publish, manufacture, market and sell the ideas, intellectual properties and instruments that enable legal persons to attain and manage their mirror world with unprecedented simplicity, minimal consumption of energy and head-spinning speed. A goal I wish you adopt after reading this is to continually create the demand for an openly computable version of traded items you acquire so the market responds by quickening the pace of standardization and harmonization for LifeGraphs, which are mobile mirror worlds sometimes on but usually off the internet.

LifeGraph is not a new term; just search it and your search engine will return tens of thousand of hits depending on how you typed it. The extension of its meaning to a mobile mirror world with its architecture comprising a native XML database management system for the xml encoded direct acyclic graphs (DAG) of 3D geometry, 3D sound and 3D touch with semantics may be new. It is imperative to mention two similar concepts, LifeLogs and LifeStreams. LifeLogs have become associated with the research of Gordon Bell, a famous computer scientist who works at Microsoft Research. David Gerlenter, author of Mirror Worlds, is strongly associated with the paradigm of LifeStreams. I think Lifegraph fits in the middle of the two terms, hopefully representing a blue ocean for governments, corporations and citizens to harvest its latent wealth of knowledge. Who will create a blue ocean strategy that will be funded and successfully implemented as the killer app of the 21st century is to be seen. There are products in the market today that portend the ubiquitous data creation, transformation and integration necessary for software companies and open source initiatives to leverage.

The LifeGraph analytical framework will be described using 30 correlated terms covering the temporal, structural, behavioral, financial, and informational properties of ownership. The temporal dimension of LifeGraphs is very long compared to software product life cycles and that is a major challenge when engaging investors on technologies that are suppose to match or outlive governments, corporations and natural persons approaching or exceeding 100 years of age. The structural dimension of LifeGraphs has a huge dynamic range (e.g., nano to mega, or 10^15) in terms of parts, elements and components of humans, legal persons and products, which are formed, measured and designed as systems of one type or another. The behavioral dimension of LifeGraphs can be completely irrational yet totally predictable over the century of life, depending on the exogenous forces acting on the plans of the legal persons and their properties. The financial dimension of LifeGraphs is described in terms of cost, price and value of traded items. The informational dimension of LifeGraphs is seen terms of data for rendering text & imagery, synthesizing sound and feeding back touch.

A LifeGraph stores scene graphs that have acoustic, haptic (as well as graphic) and metadata that are semantically compliant with ontological models of the billions of globally traded items, the hundreds of thousands of clinical terms & medical concepts for humans and the tens of thousands terms & concepts for nature's living creations and non-living formations. If not the common heritage of mankind, these objects are owned by governments, corporations and/or citizens. Today in the USA, there are ~6K governments but ~6M offices; ~10M corporations but with ~100M offices; and ~300M citizens, however the number of them what are 100 years or older today is fewer than 150K. This number is growing primarily because the number of centenarians will significantly increase during the 21st century due to better healthcare. Will the centenarians, corporations, and governments of the late 21st century favor lifelogging, lifegraphing and/or lifestreaming? What will be the reservoirs of lifelogs, lifegraphs and lifestreams? What will the ratio of these databases be with respect to one another and by owner type (i.e., government, corporation and citizen). What will be the adoption and abandonment rates for each? All of these questions and more will depend on the laws, policies and practices regarding items of ownership.

The literature on lifelogs and lifestreams seem to imply they are personal information management paradigms because the end user is written about as a private citizen, not a corporate or government official/employee performing duties for their respective legal person. LifeGraphs will be presented as a information management paradigm for governmental, business and personal information management systems because legal and natural persons are tightly coupled by the trade of goods and services, especially information, during their entire lifetime. The enterprise resource planning and manufacturing resource planning systems of the value and supply chains can be regarded as finally integrating with the consumer chain's resource planning systems. The fact these terms, ... planning systems, are modified at least three different ways is a consequence of product marketing. They are designed to efficiently plan for resources, monitor & track resources and retrieve or report information on once had resources. LifeGraph software is not much different in principle but its architecture includes virtual reality technologies for photo-realistic 3D graphics, synthesized 3D acoustics and haptics, all physics-based.

Blue Ocean strategists are asking how much information will be repurposed, how fast will it transfer and where is it leaving/going over a century of life for legal persons using a LifeGraph amongst other software applications and data structures to be effective and efficient with their limited resources? Those strategist realize LifeGraph software will affect the digital ecosystem's reservoirs, rates and ratios because it will obviate much of the digital information inertia that exists today by equipping owners with systems that allow them to assemble, sign and encrypt graphlets for trade. The blue ocean will be comprised of these untapped reservoirs, and the transfer of wealth will come with an evolution of market research protocols to access these reservoirs. Conversely, an evolution in product quality & delivery that replete these reservoirs will necessarily precede the research evolution. That evolution will be defined by manufacturers and service providers comprising the supply and value chains repurposing their products' 3D graphics, 3D acoustics and 3D haptics artifacts into files for the consumer chain. Consumers are expected to record their product usage and disposition hence adding value and taking the role of those in the supply and value chains. This behavior occurs today between governments, corporations and citizens but the overwhelming majority of objects' information aren't readily available nor transmitted at point of sale in XML encoded scene graphs.

Besides selling one's LifeGraph in increments of graphlets, owners will plan in 3D (e.g., body sculpting, material goods servicing and land acquisitions) with LifeGraph software editing tools that leverage smart product catalogs and the digital human model of the LifeGraph owner. With or without plans in e-memory, owners will integrate streams and logs of monitoring and tracking data from their instrumented property items and person via network connections. If plans exist then change detection is possible using those plans and actual objects' history. If plans don't exist, change detection is possible with the log and stream data on an item by item basis or assemblies of these mirror world objects. The options for real-time interaction with mirror worlds will include the use of an augmented reality engine. Pointing a video camera and microphone or two and augmenting that scene with your parts of a mirror world at sometime in the past, present or future to rate match the real-time nature of the streaming video and audio channels will open many possibilities for LifeGraph owners.

This is data even for one middle-class natural person in the U.S.A. when a 100-year baseline is considered for system architecting and designing. Digital data volume summaries of people and/or products spanning their life are practically impossible to find open source. Unless the counting is autonomic like breathing it's just not going to happen consistently over the person's lifetime. That's why LifeGraph success depends on public law, corporate policy and common practice. The payment card industry boasts about the tens of millions of merchants worldwide who will accept payment cards. That industry experienced linear growth from its inception until public usury law changed that allowed the industry to patronize States that gave a profitable incentive to incorporate in their State. After that public law took effect, the industry realized geometric growth.

A Digital Data Volume Summary Record
[units of measure] hierarchy of ten levels is below.

trades(traded items(transactions(files(rules(concepts(terms(parameters(values(bytes(bits))))))))))

0) bytes
1) values
3) parameters
3) terms
4) concepts
5) rules
6) files
7) transactions
8) traded items
9) trades

The number of bytes in a century old LifeGraph in early 22nd century for natural persons who are average accumulators of wealth* might be on the order of 3 x 10^15 bytes. Those petabytes contains values of parameters whether, UTF-16, RGB codes or cartesian coordinates. The number of values should be an order of magnitude less than byte size so 3 x 10^14 values. There will be far fewer unique parameters in a LifeGraph than the number of values, say 3 x 10^4. Terms probably will sum to 3 x 10^6; concepts, 3 x 10^5; rules 3 x 10^3; files 3 x 10^7; transactions easily will topple 3 x 10^7; traded items, real and digital, undoubtedly will approach 3 x 10^7 if one counts the piece parts that are serviceable; trades (not just securities) can and will contain many traded items, which can be financed causing many transactions to pay for it. In turn, there are 3 x 10 4 rules associated with the financing, the traded item's usage and taxes. The concepts behind rules exist in a smaller proportion, 3 x 10^3. Terms are often parameters but let's distinguish between

0) semantics-syntax-standards

1) persons-nature-products
2) governments-corporations-citizen
3) supply chain-value chain-consumer chain

4) data-models-simulators
5) memory-processors-telecommunications
6) graphics-acoustics-haptics

7) creations-reconfigurations-dispositions
8) plan-present-past
9) cost-price-value

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Business Plan - Outline and Product descriptions

I want your feedback on the roadmap for LifeGraph software features and capabilities. The Life in LifeGraph refers to a natural and legal persons, which are expected to live to 100 years. The Graph in LifeGraph refers to the trajectory, orientation, configuration, and operation of the natural person, a product or an instance of nature as classified by some taxonomy or ontology. Ownership is the concept that filters or bounds the scope of LifeGraphs. If and when you think about LifeGraphs you should remember you are thinking about what a person owns and not merely possesses or is in proximity to something or someone. The mobile mirror world (MMW) I seek to make available to everyone with access to a computer is a world of items traded between legal and/or natural persons during the lifetime of the person. Moreover, the periods of life when a natural person is incapable of trading (strictly speaking) those items provided to him/her are treated as if he/she traded for them. Specifically, I'm referring to natural persons in infancy, childhood, etc. and senile seniors.

The following outline will serve as a guide for the next 20 posts. I found this Table of Contents at www.bplans.com for software companies. There are hundreds of samples to choose from so I am not going to put much energy into format now.

Executive Summary
Objectives
Keys to success
Mission
Company Summary
Products
Market Analysis Summary
Strategy and Implementation Summary
Management Summary
Financial Plan
Appendix

I hope to make LifeGraph software affordable to everyone who can afford any computer system, new or used--say $10 (2010 dollars). Ironically, I see a paper-based product developing concurrently with LifeGraph software that will sell for $100 (2010 dollars) a volume just to appeal to the traditionalists who will like an acid-free paper version bounded under hardcover to last a century. A volume is a decade's worth of object-oriented transactions pretty-formatted, indexed and printed for binding.

LifeGraphs are native XML databases with valid and well-formed XML documents that are encoded with the 3D geometry, 3D acoustics and 6-DoF haptics for tangible items (i.e., goods). These documents are either richly or poorly annotated with financial, legal, regulatory and operational safety parameters found on receipts, warranties, packaging labels, instructional manuals, notices, and other printed materials for the good. Services are XML documents that animate the behavior delivered. Since the recipient of the service may not own any of the goods to be in a configuration to receive the service, the standards for providing the 3D characteristics of those items are questionable. For example, if you buy a $300 ticket to attend the superbowl and you don't even get a paper ticket but just have to show two government issued ID cards, what does the ticket seller provide you for your LifeGraph?