There is much hype surrounding how we can generate data on our devices that can track diseases. Most of the time such efforts are used to help clinicians gain objective information to place a patient into the existing bins around which clinical evidence suggests the appropriate treatment regimens. It would be nice if we could make individual assessments for proximal actions from intra-individual fluctuations and not aggregate them to the “ mean". It would be nice to find adjacent individuals whose trajectories in health/disease could inform ours. It would be nice if we could learn how to nurture individuals sharing their data and insights. It would be helpful if we could provide ways for people to assimilate and act on their individual assessments. This lecture will review some early attempts to frame the work needed to answer some of these unknowns.

Bio: Stephen Friend, scientist, physician, social entrepreneur, Chairman of Sage Bionetworks. His breakthrough approaches from the first discovery of a cancer susceptibility gene in the 1980s at Harvard and MIT, to prototyping how knowns can be used to query unknowns at the start-up he launched- Rosetta Inpharmatics, to his time at Merck leading the discovery efforts in Oncology as a SVP, to founding and leading the non-profit Sage Bionetworks that enables collaboration between researchers and participants, to The Resilience Project in 2014 , to his work in building out ResearchKit Apps all have at their center a desire to change how we work and why we do what we do.

From 2015- 2017 he was a member of the Health Special Projects Team at Apple. He is now interested in how devices can nurture the desires of individuals to navigate towards health by asking fundamental questions about how to do individual assessments and how to provide them in ways that allow one to act on these suggestions.