InnovationInspiration

Building Apps On Top of Your Genome: OAuth For Your Health Data

There’s an interesting TED talk up right now about the ‘Genomic Revolution’ (link to talk). The idea of the talk is that soon our genome will soon be so cheap to sequence, that it will become a key part of our ‘identity’ data. It will be used in providing personalized health care, but it will also be a core piece of data for other applications as well. Resnick encourages us to reflect on exactly what this means, and how we can participate/influence the oncoming ‘Genomic Revolution’.

In fact, there’s lots of interesting ideas even mentioned in the talk (reminiscent of Gattica):

• Dating apps based on genomes.
• Job applications including your genome (e.g. if you want to go to space, you need to pass certain genome requirements).
• Self-improvement/productivity apps based on your genomic pre-disposition?



What else would you build if you had access to this data? (would love to actually hear ideas)




One of the key things for this to happen is to have something that can store this health data, and can then give other app’s access to that data (in a system similar to what oAuth is for Facebook and Twitter Apps right now). This could be an interesting project to work on, and it asks an important question of how ‘data management’, and granting access to data will work in the future. What data do you want to have access to, that you don’t have access to right now - and what would developers build if they could have access to that data? Will online genome data storage and sharing be something the existing Genome companies like Resnick’s company, and 23andMe do first, or is there room for purely software companies to win in this space?

The Locker Project is a cool idea on this front - that helps you to preserve your data in a local store, and grant access to the data from there. This may be the right approach in spirit, however, I think they’re still missing out on a ‘consumer’ focused application of their technology. It could be that they’re sin the process of building the interface/app that will be a big consumer hit based on this idea right now. I’m excited about this space, and I think there’s some interesting approaches to data management and access that I’ll write about in an upcoming blog post.

So… if you had access to this data - what would you build?