Joel Selanikio: The surprising seeds of a big-data revolution in healthcare

Collecting global health data was an imperfect science: Workers tramped through villages to knock on doors and ask questions, wrote the answers on paper forms, then input the data -- and from this gappy information, countries would make huge decisions. Data geek Joel Selanikio talks through the sea change in collecting health data in the past decade -- starting with the Palm Pilot and Hotmail, and now moving into the cloud. (Filmed at TEDxAustin.)

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more.

[Kram]

it might seem like such a mundane thing but it's actually pretty impressive. The fact that it already seems to be mundane might even make it more impressive. He started around '95. Now it's 18 years later and so much has changed. This might be one of the biggest changes in the entire history. And it's almost certainly one of the fastest.

[ExclusiveManual]

It's very good that he took the time to put things into perspective how fast things changed over time in the profession that he is in. Also, I did not know that people went from door to door to collect data.

[heltok]

Save yourself some time and start watching at 9:00, the first half of this presentation is just common sense that you already know.

[ThorusCZ]

But... paper is worse than electronic data collection. I did not know that.

[GandWizard]

I guess the sketch of the old situation is to make us feel what a huge organizational change has taken place.

[SuperNerd]

About 4 years old but still relevant. People don't seem to understand that health decisions are constrained always by limited resources and lack of will. The collection of good data, easily and accessible, is the kind of advocacy that can make changes in how those limited resources are allocated or even higher level policy changes.

[michaelmcmedia]

I think the key is to make centralisation of power obsolete. History clearly shows that when you have too much power in one place, it eventually leads to disaster.

That's where distributed systems can help us - early examples being Kickstarter, providing an alternative to bank loans, Kahn Academy, alternative to a degrading education system, eBay, Bitcoin, Wikipedia, and the blogosphere, the list goes on, and we will start to see more examples affecting real world change in our lives.

[nonchalantd]

I was able to salvage 7 min. by reading this. Thanks.

[HienNguyen-sgts]

The video sound is pretty good, beyond my imagination

[DesertGardenLV]

I like how he took the first 7 mins to explain 3 seconds of his content.

[ExclusiveManual]

A couple more decades and we can directly transfer our thoughts!

[pecabokem]

"If my government is clearly not doing well and greed and corruption is apparent, people will speak up and a new government will arise."

Even if the people do speak up and something actually comes out from it, new governments DO NOT magically arise. There may be small changes or a shift in leadership, but for significant change to occur there needs to time. Almost always, broken governments have problems too deeply seeded to be fixed by a simple change of leaders.

[stupidystu]

30 years ago I would have probable agreed with you. But the nature of people in power just doesn't change.

[ArneSchmitz]

Actually quite a few. Feature phones using JavaEE are very common in Africa. Landlines may not be available. But mobile phone networks and cheap featurephones are.

[Nualaboala]

Less talk, more action! Good presentation though. Very interesting stuff.

[djam]

They only need to be able to send the forms to Magpi by text. Obviously you need a computer with Java installed to be able to access the data (something midwives and school teachers don't need to do).

[urbanhairess]

You'd be very surprised at how much mobile penetration there already is in Sub-Saharan Africa. It's a huge market. Meaning that people are literate enough to use the technology. You'd also be surprised at how far mobile coverage reaches over there now. People in rural areas do have and use cellphones in a lot of Sub-Sahara Africa.

[JanNouwen]

How to use this in settings where there is no mobile coverage!?

[EKristine]

This is such a broad video. "if my government is clearly not doing well and greed and corruption is apparent, people will speak up and a new government will arise". is it even understood how the government works? that is something that will not happen. sure, there will be small changes that might come forth, but new governments do not just come out of the air. but, just for discussion, lets say one would. there is greed and corruption, people speak up and poof, new government. who is to say that this new gov't wouldn't have the same issues? what if this new gov't is actually a dictatorship who is going to be the head, the first to speak our of the ones who support them? there us always much more deep seeded issues that would need to be taken care of if you wanted to fix the broken gov't. then stating that "I just want the right people to use all this data for the right purposes". one more thing, that is never going to happen. it is ridiculous to think that the data will be used for the right purposes. the world and the information is not safe prom the predators or the people looking to do malicious things with what they find. it is a new world, and it revolves around needing to be more careful. they will not change, so we need to change our actions instead.

[beckerth]

I am a civil engineer from germany. How can I help ?
We use the net for structural design and training our engineers.