Recently, I was reading an interview conducted by McKinsey & Company with Mr. Eric Schmidt, Google’s Executive Chairman, on “The impact of disruptive technology” and I was pleasantly surprised of the first thing he talked about was how computing technology is influencing our healthcare systems, it was aptly titled, ‘Biology goes digital’.
Mr. Schmidt is indeed a visionary technologist whose company GOOGLE is changing the way we see our mobile and PC. The technology is being explored on scenes where one has chances of having a volume impact on many, many people, or large segments of the society. The technological information is made available to everyone in the world. Technology is changing education, intellectual property works, it changes the way businesses are being conducted, it changes the way the media works, and so on.
When a personality like Mr. Schmidt mentions about how now biology will be affected by technology makes us believe and be more confident on our own system of computing the risk of onset of diabetes in individuals through GRASS-DIABETES.com
Mr. Schmidt clarified that the same tools and techniques for combinatorial calculations, which is the kind of analytical computer we use today, when applied to biological systems, has an even greater impact.
The interview was echoing the same thoughts which had made us do our decades of research and put it all together in complex algorithms. It was like taking the analog world of biology - how genes work, how diabetes works - and putting them in a digital framework, did complex calculations, we did some machine learning on how things happen, hired technology experts, these efforts to calculate the risk of diabetes whose accuracy level is more than 90% will not only help us become a better human being, but predict what’s going to happen to us physically in terms of our health.
Everything we did do to build a model of how diabetes works in our biological systems, how our genes affect the disease, all these sorts of things, was a serious step change in the diabetes world.
We have built databases of our thousands of patients we consulted since 1989 and prepared a model of individual diagnosis of disease, where you can literally just press a button, and the sequences occur, and it tells you when this dreaded disease may affect you.
We are so thankful of Mr. Eric Schmidt and the like minded who believe in possibilities of such biological technological disruptions and believing in how these are going to impact our economies, and more importantly our health.
Image courtesy of renjith krishnan FreeDigitalPhotos.net
