Pathway Genomics: Bringing Watson’s Smarts to Personal Health and Fitness

Michael Nova, Chief Medical Officer, Pathway Genomics

To describe me as a health nut would be a gross understatement. I run five days a week, bench press 275 pounds, do 120 pushups at a time, and surf the really big waves in Indonesia. I don’t eat red meat, I typically have berries for breakfast and salad for dinner, and I consume an immense amount of kale—even though I don’t like the way it tastes. My daily vitamin/supplement regimen includes Alpha-lipoic acid, Coenzyme Q and Resveratrol. And, yes, I wear one of those fitness gizmos around my neck to count how many steps I take in a day.

I have been following this regimen for years, and it’s an essential part of my life.

For anybody concerned about health, diet and fitness, these are truly amazing times. There’s a superabundance of health and fitness information published online. We’re able to tap into our electronic health records, we can measure just about everything we do physically, and, thanks to the plummeting price of gene sequencing, we can map our complete genomes for as little as $3000 and get readings on smaller chunks of genomic data for less than $100.

Think of it as your own personal health big-data tsunami.

The problem is we’re confronted with way too much of a good thing. There’s no way an individual like me or you can process all of the raw information that’s available to us—much less make sense out of it. That’s why I’m looking forward to being one of the first customers for a new mobile app that my company, Pathway Genomics, is developing with help from IBM Watson Group.

Surfing in Indonesia

Called Pathway Panorama, the smartphone app will make it possible for individuals to ask questions in everyday language and get answers in less than three seconds that take into consideration their personal health, diet and fitness scenarios combined with more general information. The result is recommendations that fit each of us like a surfer’s wet suit. Say you’ve just flown from your house on the coast to a city that’s 10,000 feet above sea level. You might want to ask how far you could safely run on your first day after getting off the plane—and at what pulse rate should you slow your jogging pace.

Or say you’re diabetic and you’re in a city you have never visited before. You had a pastry for breakfast and you want to know when you should take your next shot of insulin. In an emergency, you’ll be able to find specialized healthcare providers near where you are who can take care of you.

Whether you’re totally healthy and want to maximize your physical performance or you have health issues and want to reduce risks, this service will give you the advice you need. It’s like a guardian angel sitting on your shoulder who will also pre-emptively offer you help even if you don’t ask for it.

We use Watson’s language processing and cognitive abilities and combine them with information from a host of sources. The critical data comes from individual 
DNA and biomarker analysis that Pathway Genomics performs using a variety of devices and software tools.

Pathway Genomics, which launched 6 years ago in San Diego, already has a growing business of providing individual health reports delivered primarily through individuals’ personal physicians. With our Pathway Panorama app, we’ll reach out directly to consumers in a big way.

We’re in the middle of raising a new round of venture financing to pay for the expansion of our business. This brings to $80 million the amount of venture capital we have raised in the past six years—which makes us one of the best capitalized healthcare startups.

IBM is investing in Pathway Genomics as part of its commitment of $100 million to companies that are bringing to market a new generation of apps and services infused with Watson’s cognitive computing intelligence. This is the third such investment IBM has made this year.

We expect the app to be available in midi2015. We have not yet set pricing, but we expect to charge a small monthly fee. We also are creating a version for physicians.

To me, the real beauty of the Panorama app is that it will make it possible for us to safeguard our health and improve our fitness without obsessing all the time. We’ll just live our lives, and, when we need help, we’ll get it.

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To learn more about the new era of computing, read Smart Machines: IBM’s Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing.

ORIGINAL: A Smarter Planet

November, 12th 2014

By Michael Nova M.D.

10 IBM Watson-Powered Apps That Are Changing Our World

IBM is investing $1 billion in its IBM Watson Group with the aim of creating an ecosystem of startups and businesses building cognitive computing applications with Watson. Here are 10 examples that are making an impact.

IBM considers Watson to represent a new era of computing — a step forward to cognitive computing, where apps and systems interact with humans via natural language and help us augment our own understanding of the world with big data insights.

Big Blue isn't playing small ball with that claim. It has opened a new IBM Watson Global Headquarters in the heart of New York City's Silicon Alley and is investing $1 billion into the Watson Group, focusing on development and research as well as bringing cloud-delivered cognitive applications and services to the market. That includes $100 million available for venture investments to support IBM's ecosystem of start-ups and businesses building cognitive apps with Watson.

Here are 10 examples of Watson-powered cognitive apps that are already starting to shake things up.

Image courtesy USAA/IBM Feature Photo Service/Flickr

USAA and Watson Help Military Members Transition to Civilian Life

USAA, a financial services firm dedicated to those who serve or have served in the military, has turned to IBM's Watson Engagement Advisor in a pilot program to help military men and women transition to civilian life.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 155,000 active military members transition to civilian life each year. This process can raise many questions, like "Can I be in the reserve and collect veteran's compensation benefits?" or "How do I make the most of the Post-9/11 GI Bill?" Watson has analyzed and understands more than 3,000 documents on topics exclusive to military transitions, allowing members to ask it questions and receive answers specific to their needs.

Wayblazer

Sofie 

LifeLearn Sofie is an intelligent treatment support tool for veterinarians of all backgrounds and levels of experience. Sofie is powered by IBM WatsonTM, the world’s leading cognitive computing system. She can understand and process natural language, enabling interactions that are more aligned with how humans think and interact.

Implement Watson

Dive deeper into subjects. Find insights where no one ever thought to look before. From Healthcare to Retail, there's an IBM Watson Solution that's right for your enterprise.

Healthcare

Helping doctors identify treatment options

The challenge

App Captures the Boston Bombing’s Psychological Effects

ORIGINAL: IEEE Spectrum
By Eliza Strickland
27 Aug 2013


Could psychological-monitoring apps become as common as fitness and activity gadgets?

Image: Cogito A Mind Minder: Cogito's mood-monitoring app can detect signals of psychological distress

In April, the software company Cogito was halfway through a clinical trial to see if it could detect symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) through a smartphone app. All of the 100 participants in the study lived around Boston. Then, on 15 April, two bombs went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring hundreds. Suddenly, Cogito’s clinical trial was a lot more relevant.

The trial was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under its Detection and Computational Analysis of Psychological Signals program. To address the troubling number of psychological problems and suicides among active-duty military personnel and veterans, the U.S. Department of Defense is seeking technologies that can identify at-risk individuals so professionals can help them.

Cogito, a Boston-based MIT spin-off, developed an app that keeps track of a person’s social behavior and vocal characteristics. The app monitors the phone’s location and time of use and also logs phone calls and text messages. (It doesn’t look at the content of those calls and texts.) Finally, there’s an active component: Participants can choose to fill out questionnaires about their mood and can record audio diaries. Cogito’s expertise is in automated speech analysis, which it applies to those audio diaries; future iterations could mine phone conversations for information as well.

Put all the data together and you’re able to tell a lot about a person, says Cogito CEO Joshua Feast. Sometimes you even find signs of distress that people don’t want to admit to or haven’t recognized themselves. “We’re able to look at sleep, mood, social isolation, and physical isolation,” says Feast, all of which can serve as “honest signals” of psychological trouble. In the Boston trial, Cogito was only testing the sophisticated algorithms it developed to aggregate the data. If the trial works out, future versions of the software could provide these summaries to clinicians to allow them to intervene and could also give the information to the subjects themselves.

All of this can seem rather creepy—apps that get inside your head and reveal your emotional secrets. But Feast says that’s why his company places so much emphasis on privacy and trust. If Cogito’s system becomes a commercial product, there will be legal guarantees that a user will always own and control his or her own data. For example, a user could choose whether or not to share the data with a clinician. Feast says he doesn’t think users would have it any other way. “Morally it’s the right thing to do, and also for adoption it’s the right thing to do,” he says.

The participants in the Boston trial included veterans, civilians with histories of trauma or depression, and some healthy civilians. While the bulk of the data from the study is still being analyzed, Feast says the impact of the April bombing is already clear. The algorithms picked up more markers of stress in the participants, including decreased use of the app’s interactive components. “Fewer survey questions were being answered, and fewer audio diaries were being recorded,” he says.

Further study of the data will answer other important questions about the nature of depression and PTSD, says Feast: “What is resilience? What kind of people fared better after the bombing? What happens to people with vulnerability when things like this happen?” The company is still formulating its research questions, he says.

The Durkheim Project, another initiative funded by this DARPA program, focuses more narrowly on identifying veterans at risk of suicide. Chris Poulin, director of the project, explains that his system predicts suicide risk by analyzing veterans’ text messages and their posting on social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Poulin says he’s impressed with the scope of Cogito’s data collection and its incorporation of voice monitoring. “There are other people out there collecting mobile data and looking at activity metrics, but very few people have integrated voice data,” he says.

Cogito’s voice-analysis software, Cogito Dialog, monitors vocal characteristics such as level of excitement and fluidity of speech. Feast explains that it’s tricky to get clear data in this area because there’s so much natural variation in people’s speech habits. However, the system can detect changes to an individual’s speech patterns over time and can also be useful in telemedicine. For example, if a clinician calls veterans and asks them all the same series of questions, a monitoring system can flag people with unusual responses. “Speech analysis is well suited for looking at population norms and deviation from the norms,” says Feast.

Feast believes that the company’s experience with the Boston bombing provides a preview of a possible future where psychological monitoring apps are as common as the fitness and activity gadgets that proliferate today. “When there’s an earthquake or terrorist attack or traumatic event that hits a population center, this technology could support a rapid response team for psychological distress,” he says. “It would be like the CDC [Centers for Disease Control] responding to a flu outbreak.”