You’ve probably been hearing about big data everywhere—traffic patterns, video streams, genome sequences—and how it is changing lives, accelerating commerce, and even improving health. But most of the time the conversation focuses on what business professionals and scientists might need, want, or do with big data. It’s time to consider how the ordinary person can benefit from this data revolution.
But first, what exactly is big data and why should you (and your father, mother, siblings, and friends) care about it?
The term “big data” can be used to describe data with a range of characteristics. It covers high volume data (like the whole human genome) or data that streams at a high velocity (like the constant flow of image data from space exploring satellites). It also includes high variety data (such as the mix of chemical process, electrical potential, and blood flow observed during brain studies) that may have high levels of variability (like around-the-clock monitoring of traffic flows through busy highways). Ultimately, a key to big data is its high value, whether that’s important to commerce or to the discovery of new cancer drugs. Scientists are learning how to make discoveries through data, and businesses are learning to leverage big data to glean key customer insights.
But big data can be and is of value to the everyday person as well. It already helps us navigate through a new city using map and traffic apps and to find interesting information through search engines, among other things.
Here at the NLM we want find ways to help people use big data to help manage health and health concerns. It may help them know what to do in an emergency, to better understand their family risks for heart disease, or to learn just how much exercise might ward off Alzheimer’s disease.
Toward that end, we are funding a grant award, Data Science Research: Personal Health Libraries for Consumers and Patients (R01) (PAR-17-159).
We’re looking for researchers who want to partner with lay people to discover how to bring the power of big data into their lives. To do that, we need fresh approaches to biomedical informatics and data science, shaped to meet the needs of consumers and patients, whose health literacy, language skills, technical sophistication, education, and cultural traditions affect how they find, understand, and use personal health information. Novel data science approaches are needed to help individuals at every step, from harvesting to storing to using data and information in a personal health library.
If you’re a researcher interested in discovering new biomedical informatics knowledge to help consumers and patients make use of big data, this opportunity is for YOU! If you’re a clinician or a librarian, reach out to your science colleagues to form a partnership. If you’re a patient, find a researcher at your local university and invite yourself into the process of citizen science.
Much of the data behind the big data revolution originates from everyday people. Many of the benefits of the big data revolution could help improve the lives of everyday people. In other words, it is your father’s, mother’s, siblings’, and friends’ big data—let’s make it useful to them!