LAGOS – Applications for the ITU Telecom World Young Innovators Competition for health has opened with the competition set to look for entrepreneurs with innovative ideas on how to apply big data technology to health issues. This include the use of electronic health records, personalised treatment regimens, public health or health systems planning, outbreak response, or applications on the technical side of big data, such as data protection and privacy, algorithms and visualisation for data analysis, data filtering methods, interoperability of systems, metadata, or collection processes.
In a statement sent to Sundiata Post, the International Communications Union (ITU) said “Big data is one of the major rising issues in tech today. In 2013, and ITU report stated that 90 per cent of data had been created in the previous two years. That pace led to SAP citing prediction of six trillion terabytes of data available in 2014. That amount of data allows a variety of fields, public transportation, utility, health, migration, education, labor and more to be revolutionised by the access to and analysis of this data.”
Health care is one of the most exciting frontiers for big data today. As cited by the ITU, an average hospital is expected to output 665 terabytes of data annually. That data can be used by individuals to create specialised treatment plans, or by public health experts to design health systems that better aid their communities. Population level data has been key to stopping outbreaks, starting from John Snow, the father of public health, to the recent West African Ebola epidemic.
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Since 2003, ITU has been a leader in helping to foster and develop e-health solutions, to apply technological solutions to this central issue of the UN Development Agenda and SAP helping companies across a wide variety of sectors achieve analysis solutions.
The competition is open to participants between the ages of 18 and 30 and have either an established startup or the concept for a new one.
Big data is not without its problems. Issues of interoperability, analysis and privacy have to be part of the conversation. With 80 per cent of data in the world uncategorised, making one system work with another is a major challenge. Turning data into actionable intelligence is a key problem occupying a number of emerging fields in IT. The possibility that intentional surveillance or a data breach may expose intimate details of our lives to outsiders is a major concern for those working in cyber security. These are questions that must be addressed before we realize the full potential of big data.