Can We See the Invisible, Together?
About three years ago, I was staring at a monitor wall of 2 million crowdsourced “clues” to identify archaeological tombs in Mongolia when three people in black suits walked up and stopped in their tracks. Two of them were from the Department of Defense, and the third was a gruff young doctor named Eliah Spencer (M.D. & PH.D.) from the infectious disease department of UC San Diego’s School of Medicine. Looking back now, this is the exact moment that the Oasis Project was born.
As they walked by this wall of technicolor data, Eliah exclaimed, “this is exactly what I am talking about!”
What he was seeing was lots (millions) of independent annotations on a satellite image of the earth, collectively identifying features on the ground as if they were trends. Online volunteers had actually mapped many thousands of miles remote Outer Mongolia for dirt roads, rivers, and potential archaeological anomalies that I had the honor of ground truthing on horseback over the course of three summers.
I explained that these were crowdsourced annotations made by over 20,000 public online volunteers, at which point Eliah practically started convulsing with excitement.
“Health is geospatial” he said. “If we can see trends spatially, we can start to ‘see’ health.”
Soon our conversations sprawled out in many directions, tumbling through concepts like citizen sensing, crowdsourcing, mobile health, and the slew of things that we could actually “see” if people were empowered and mobilized to begin collecting and sharing data (areas affected by water pollution, for example).
We talked about the idea a “living map”, where citizen-sensing could create real-time knowledge about the status of things on the ground. It turns out this is partly how Google traffic maps work. The individual action of looking up one’s location is simultaneously providing a point of data (position, speed, and vector) that, when combined with the unknowing contributions of other GPS users, can provide a very useful assessment of the traffic flow for that road, to be used by those users It’s a “digital mutualism.” If we could create this kind of perpetual knowledge-sharing ecosystem for things like public health and pollution, we could see and solve real problems as never before.
To cultivate this kind of ecosystem we need three things: 1) Ubiquitous (and therefore low-cost) technology that can sense indicators of health and pollution; 2) sensors that are connected through cell phones or other networks; and 3) figuring out the “digital mutualism” incentives that would drive people to use such a system.
That day we decided to try to create such an ecosystem, and the Distributed Health Labs was born. Our idea was to build the technology stack that would enable a human-powered sensor network for problems that really matter, like tracking pollution or infectious diseases.
One of our first targets is water, the substance upon which all life on this planet depends. From fracking to mining, our use of land has transformed our water systems. The biggest problem is that much of this is invisible. There is no smoke alarm for water pollution. But what if we could empower indigenous communities to become the citizen sensors to map pollutants as they appear? Our thought was that by “seeing” the problem, communities could start to deal with the problems. This was how the OASIS Project was created: an effort to get low-cost, connected water sensors into the hands of global citizens around the world.
This same sensor technology stack, built upon the concept of connected networks, could be augmented to measure vital health metrics, so that people could start to see their health in a similar way.
It goes back to what Eliah said that day: “Health is geospatial, if we can see trends spatially, we can start to ‘see’ health.” And to us, health is both medical and environmental.
Three years later, and with a motley team of hackers, makers, doctors, and explorers, we have actually built the physical sensors and technical infrastructure to make this possible.
We have built the first prototypes of what could become a “Tricorder for the Globe”, a citizen sensing network to see and tackle some of our biggest challenges, together… and it’s all open source. Now all we need are the people to bring this network to life. The OASIS project is now looking for people like YOU to join, and support the sensor network by becoming part of it yourself. Visit our project on Indiegogo to learn more and see how you can join!
As they walked by this wall of technicolor data, Eliah exclaimed, “this is exactly what I am talking about!”
What he was seeing was lots (millions) of independent annotations on a satellite image of the earth, collectively identifying features on the ground as if they were trends. Online volunteers had actually mapped many thousands of miles remote Outer Mongolia for dirt roads, rivers, and potential archaeological anomalies that I had the honor of ground truthing on horseback over the course of three summers.
I explained that these were crowdsourced annotations made by over 20,000 public online volunteers, at which point Eliah practically started convulsing with excitement.
“Health is geospatial” he said. “If we can see trends spatially, we can start to ‘see’ health.”
Soon our conversations sprawled out in many directions, tumbling through concepts like citizen sensing, crowdsourcing, mobile health, and the slew of things that we could actually “see” if people were empowered and mobilized to begin collecting and sharing data (areas affected by water pollution, for example).
We talked about the idea a “living map”, where citizen-sensing could create real-time knowledge about the status of things on the ground. It turns out this is partly how Google traffic maps work. The individual action of looking up one’s location is simultaneously providing a point of data (position, speed, and vector) that, when combined with the unknowing contributions of other GPS users, can provide a very useful assessment of the traffic flow for that road, to be used by those users It’s a “digital mutualism.” If we could create this kind of perpetual knowledge-sharing ecosystem for things like public health and pollution, we could see and solve real problems as never before.
To cultivate this kind of ecosystem we need three things: 1) Ubiquitous (and therefore low-cost) technology that can sense indicators of health and pollution; 2) sensors that are connected through cell phones or other networks; and 3) figuring out the “digital mutualism” incentives that would drive people to use such a system.
That day we decided to try to create such an ecosystem, and the Distributed Health Labs was born. Our idea was to build the technology stack that would enable a human-powered sensor network for problems that really matter, like tracking pollution or infectious diseases.
One of our first targets is water, the substance upon which all life on this planet depends. From fracking to mining, our use of land has transformed our water systems. The biggest problem is that much of this is invisible. There is no smoke alarm for water pollution. But what if we could empower indigenous communities to become the citizen sensors to map pollutants as they appear? Our thought was that by “seeing” the problem, communities could start to deal with the problems. This was how the OASIS Project was created: an effort to get low-cost, connected water sensors into the hands of global citizens around the world.
This same sensor technology stack, built upon the concept of connected networks, could be augmented to measure vital health metrics, so that people could start to see their health in a similar way.
It goes back to what Eliah said that day: “Health is geospatial, if we can see trends spatially, we can start to ‘see’ health.” And to us, health is both medical and environmental.
Three years later, and with a motley team of hackers, makers, doctors, and explorers, we have actually built the physical sensors and technical infrastructure to make this possible.
We have built the first prototypes of what could become a “Tricorder for the Globe”, a citizen sensing network to see and tackle some of our biggest challenges, together… and it’s all open source. Now all we need are the people to bring this network to life. The OASIS project is now looking for people like YOU to join, and support the sensor network by becoming part of it yourself. Visit our project on Indiegogo to learn more and see how you can join!
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