Good For You project for open health data tracking | opensource.com

"Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are collecting enormous amounts of information all day, every day. They use powerful supercomputers to analyze this data. Many people use this to better market products to consumers, for instance. But, how can big data do more? We see companies and inventors coming out with ideas for improving healthcare, for one, by tracking human biometrics. I think we can take it to the next level and make more wide-scale improvements to our health and our lives. After a long struggle with addiction, I've realized a dream of mine is to use the health data and analysis of the masses to help solve problems of the mind and body that afflict millions of people worldwide. Good For You is that initiative. I believe that many of the world's population understands that if we're "on the grid", a lot of our information is already out there. My call is for people to not only share their personal shopping preferences, but their health preferences too. Globally and locally, we can come together to help solve bigger, more important problems than that of capitalism and consumerism. I believe millions would opt-in to a project like this. Would you? I get excited at the prospect of making life better for both myself and future generations by simply making a record of the things I'm eating and doing everyday. The personal benefit is huge. The group benefit is even bigger. For a program like this to operate successfully, the entire process would need to be open: collaboration and transparency. By keeping every element of the system open, we could perform these same analytical methods on every aspect of the process itself, promoting rapid evolution and agility. A strong, volunteer-driven effort could do tremendous things and overtime, grow this program into a strong community of contributors. Components needed to succeed: [1] open source software [2] open standards for data collection, documentation, and scientific methods [3] open access and research, where all results, experiments, and peer reviewed journals are shared ..."