Smartphone goes a notch up

Thanks to DailyData, it can be your personal physician always on call

Smartphones can do many things. Now, thanks to the DailyData application, it can even double up as your personal physician always on call.

The application, which can be used globally, is available at http://www.getdailydata.com/Help/GettingStarted. Registration is necessary, and invites are sent out for it to be installed and used.

“We understand that there is a whole ecosystem of applications to monitor health out there,” says Anmol Madan, a Ph.D. from MIT Media lab, and who is one of the founders of Ginger.io. “But DailyData works differently. Think of your phone as a proxy for your behaviour. Your calls, SMS and emails, all indicate how active you are on the phone.”

He continues: “My earlier research [on modelled large-scale human behaviour data using statistical and pattern recognition methods] has proved that this behaviour changes when the user is not well or is symptomatic.” For example, a person about to go into a state of depression will isolate himself and stop calling the number of people he used to call earlier, or he will call only certain numbers.

Working on this principle, Ginger.io first creates a baseline model of a user's mobile-phone activity and looks for the variations. When digressions are detected, it sends out alerts like ‘Are you okay?' It is aimed at healthy folk who want to monitor their wellness as well.

While other health applications usually need data to be fed in manually, DailyData collects the information automatically. This can be supplemented by data (regarding changes, if any) entered manually. Data sent across can be viewed on either android phones or in the users' account of www.getdailydata.com. Updates are made at frequent intervals.

The product uses only a few KB of data, so there aren't significant increases in mobile costs. Privacy is one aspect to which the creators paid a great deal of attention. “Data is sent to our secure servers for analysis and encrypted for greater security,” says Madan.