Business Models for Free Analytics based on Household Power and Personal Motion Data for Fitness-Wellness Applications (MyHealthTrainer)

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Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK

£246,720

March 1, 2012

June 30, 2012

The scenario can scale from a small business with a few users connected via social networking and data sold to companies that want a representative sample of the population right up to full population coverage. The core platform can be extended to add many more sources of data for people monitoring such as existing personal information databases, temperature, blood pressure, transport sector data, smart city. It can also be extended outside the retail customers, for example governments could be offered a near real time population census, which might show the response to large scale events like very hot weather, storms or disease epidemiology.
Potential Challenges: (1) Convergence of data for different sectors will be limited if the user sets are disjoint. (2) The uncontrolled use of detailed personal activity data is unethical. The trade of free e-health service for limited loss of privacy needs design and informed user consent. (3) IoT has “walled gardens” or applications specific to the service provider. It takes time to break down the walls and let the users choose the best applications independent of the communications and device solutions. (4) Sensor networks built for one application may not provide data suitable for another application. For example the UK smart meter system samples power every 15 seconds and reports it in batches much less frequently. This design will limit the accuracy and latency of the e-health service. (5) A UK wide system would generate 32.5 terabytes/day so new database technologies like Hadoop Hbase and neo4j are needed.
Added Value of Funding: it will justify us spending time exploring this business case, the demonstrator and publicity will act as a hook to get us into meetings. We expect to have convergence potential with other funded projects and be able to exchange ideas with them and the TSB staff. The details of the scenario were conceived as a result of the competition brief but it has potential impact to the cross-sector of smart metering and e-health. MRC perceives this business opportunity as a way to open their data to the public in an accessible way.