Institute For The Future

Info Ecosystems for Well-being Conference

By the year 2020, it’s estimated we’ll have 45 times more data than we had at the beginning of this decade—an explosion of information that is often called big data. Technologies such as biosensors and augmented reality point toward a radical expansion in the sources and kinds of information that matter for health and well-being. This growth in information is creating enormous potential for transforming innovation in health and well-being.

We hosted our annual client-only Health Horizons conference, Innovating Information Ecosystems: The Next Decade and Beyond at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco on June 13 - 14. We used our new forecast map, Information Ecosystems for Well-being, to think systematically about opportunities to use information to build capacities for health and well-being. Over the course of two days, we presented the map’s forecasts, focusing on three hotspots of health information innovation:

automation and prediction,
roles and interactions, and
high-resolution understanding.
We also brought together dozens of leading innovators to explore this new frontier in health and well-being. Together, we created insights and built strategies for making information actionable for health and well-being. The public could participate online by following the hashtag #hh2012. We also tweeted live from the conference under the handle @iftf.

Before the official start, there was a pre-conference session, “Information Ecosystems: BigData and Technology Foundations.” IFTF Distinguished Fellow Mike Liebhold (@mikeliebhold), a tech veteran with decades of experience working in innovation for companies like Apple and Intel, led an exploration of some of the emerging challenges of understanding and making sense of big data. He was joined in discussion by Jeremy Howard (@jeromei), President and Chief Scientist of Kaggle, Wayne Pan, Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Health Access, and Eva Ho (@eva_ho), Vice President of Marketing at Factual.

Participants were also able to go on a pre-conference mobile adventure walk designed by Shinobi Labs, a 20-minute interactive exploration of Mission Bay.

Overview of Day 1 (June 13):

After a welcome from Health Horizons Program Director Rod Falcon (@rodfalcon) and Research Affiliate Mary Cain (@maisybones), Rod set the context for the conference by highlighting recent challenges and innovations in health information ecosystems. Research Director Miriam Lueck Avery (@myravery) then used Health Horizons’ new Map of the Decade as a guide to take us on a tour of the future of information ecosystems.

After a short break, Research Directors Brinda Dalal and Bradley Kreit (@bkreit) presented the first innovation hotspot, “Automated and Predictive Systems,” highlighting how emerging analytic capabilities are reshaping health.

The day closed with a keynote by Joseph Turow (@joeprof), author of The Daily You. He highlighted opportunities to use personalizing information to improve health—as well as ways that information personalization could harm efforts to improve health.

Overview of Day 2 (June 14):

The second day kicked off with Rod and Brad sharing the second innovation hotspot, “Amplified Roles and Interactions,” in which they explored how innovations in information ecosystems will create new kinds of health experiences, as different roles and capabilities emerge. Following that was a panel discussion, “Shifting Health Experiences” featuring Jeffrey Bigham (@jeffbigham) of the University of Rochester, Eri Gentry (@erigentry) of Scanadu, and Hannah Chung (@hchung) and Aaron Horowitz (@aaronjhorowitz) of Sproutel. These panelists are all developing new technologies and data-intensive strategies to improve health experiences; they discussed the current and future opportunities their work creates.

After another break-out brainstorming session, participants had the opportunity to attend an optional book talk during lunch, in which IFTF Distinguished Fellow Bob Johansen (@bobiftf) presented highlights from the new edition of his book Leaders Make the Future.

After lunch, Brinda and Miriam presented the third innovation hotspot, “High Resolution Views and Understandings,” in which they explored new forms of data, such as microbial ecosystems, cross-species health and chronobiology, that are giving us higher-resolution views into our personal and collective health.

The conference concluded with a panel discussion, featuring Hugh Dubberly of Dubberyly Design Office, Noah Fierer (@noahfierer) of the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Jai Haissman (@jhaissman) of Affective Interfaces. These leading innovators joined us to explore how their work in measuring and communicating health data will drive new kinds of health and well-being interventions.

We are very excited about the new research we presented at the conference and hope you followed along on Twitter with the hashtag #hh2012.