The Public Health Agency of Canada’s website states, Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death in adult Canadian men and women.
After looking at the Heart Monitor for iPhone app, which allows you to find your heart rate, It struck me that, for the purposes of Tele-epidemiology, it would be interesting to invite folks who are using the Heart Monitor to allow uploads of their data to a publicly accessible database.
When mashed with anonymized user profiles (e.g. location, age, sex), this data might reveal some interesting and useful patterns. One question I have is whether this would be of any value to public health agencies and researchers.
My next question would be, what incentives would be necessary to persuade users to allow the upload of their data. My guess is many would be perfectly willing to allow it for the common good – if they could see how their data was being used (maybe with some nice visualization overlaying a map mashup).
And my final question is what would encourage the developers of Health Monitor to implement this feature? Some incentive might be necessary here… Don’t know.
Any ideas?