Institute For The Future

The Future of Medical Microwork

My lates Fast Coexist piece is available here. In it, I argue that medical microwork is emerging as a means to improve global health-as well as an innovative development strategy. It begins:

 

 

Last year, a group of researchers led by a computer scientist at the University of Rochester put out a brilliant app called VizWiz with the very simple, but very powerful, idea of using what’s called "microwork" to help people with vision impairment navigate the sort of everyday visual questions that most of us don’t even notice. The app works like this: A user takes a picture of something--a piece of currency, say--with their phone and asks a question, like “How much is this bill worth?” In near real-time, the photo and question get routed through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, or through a user’s Facebook network, to find out their bill is worth $10.

 

The app represents an example of the emerging category of microwork, where complex informational questions are broken down into discrete tasks that require human intelligence and distributed to individuals who perform those tasks for small payments of just a few cents. While medical microwork is almost unheard of outside of a handful of examples like VizWiz, it represents a kind of work that could become increasingly important over the next few years as both a tool to improve health and as a development strategy.

 

 

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