LAURENCE MORONEY: Welcome to the Googleplex.
This is an incredible place with lots of great stuff being
worked on every single day.
Before I worked here, I always wondered
what it would be like to come to the Googleplex,
meet up with a Googler, and have coffee with them,
and just chat about what they do, how they do it,
and why they do it.
And today we're going to do exactly that.
Welcome to this episode of "Coffee with a Googler."
I'm Laurence Moroney, and today we have a really special show.
And if you only ever watch one episode, let it be this one,
because today we have a cloud developer advocate called
Heidi Dohse who's joining us.
And Heidi is a whole lot more than just a cloud
developer advocate.
She's a really inspirational woman with a great background
and a fabulous story.
But before we get to that, tell us
all about being a cloud developer advocate.
What do you do?
HEIDI DOHSE: So I'm on our Google Cloud Platform team,
and I work with our cloud product managers, our sales
team, and our engineering team to kind of figure out
what are we doing with cloud, customer needs,
and really how do we also connect the dots internal
to Google to leverage what we're doing with the Google Cloud
Platform.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool.
Do you have a particular favorite technology in cloud?
I'm an App Engine guy.
HEIDI DOHSE: So what I'm really intrigued with what we're doing
is what we're doing with our Genomics platforms.
Obviously, I have a passion for, how
do we change the delivery and the future of health care,
so Google Cloud Platform is allowing
us to do some really interesting things
and talk with our Google Life Sciences
team, who is doing some great research
and interesting projects.
And all of that living on Google Cloud
Platform along with Genomics and then
just creating an infrastructure that
will allow other companies to build their medical tools
and products on our service.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Now you've mentioned Genomics
and medical tools and products, and I
know you've got this great background.
You used to be like a competitive windsurfer,
and then life happened.
So tell us about it.
HEIDI DOHSE: Well, I did.
I grew up in the sports industry.
I was a competitive windsurfer, skier,
I played multiple sports, a variety of sports
as a child growing up.
And then one day, turns out I actually
was diagnosed with a really rare heart arrhythmia,
and kind of had my engine tweaked.
And next thing you know, technology
became very important both on the inside and the outside.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Nice, and then one day
you learned something about your heart.
HEIDI DOHSE: I did.
I had one of those moments in life that changes everything.
I was 18 years old, and I was going in
between seasons, between ski season and windsurfing season,
in order to have some surgery on my knee
to clean up a little bit of mess I'd made in there.
And I also had my first EKG as part of the pre-surgery pre-op.
So they put all the little stickers on me,
and the nurse is there, and the strip
starts coming out of the machine,
and her eyes get bigger and bigger.
And next thing you know, the cardiologist is there,
and it turns out that 270 beats per minute is not normal.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Wow.
HEIDI DOHSE: Yeah, and so I thought, ah,
that's why I couldn't count my pulls.
LAURENCE MORONEY: It's just so fast.
HEIDI DOHSE: It was.
And my heart rate, it turns out, would go up as high as 270,
but it would also go down at like 12 and 14 beats
per minute.
So it was just really irregular.
So there I am-- healthy, active, 18-year-old athlete--
and they said no knee surgery.
We're sending you off to the coronary care unit,
and you're now going to start this journey of a heart
patient.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Oh, wow.
So that led you to like lots of pacemakers, right?
HEIDI DOHSE: It did.
First, it led me to the-- I spent a month in the hospital
while they tried to figure out what to do with me.
They tried all kinds of experimental drugs.
They tried to figure out what it was that I had,
and I ended up in the medical journals,
because it was like, well, we found something new.
And they said, gee, we're not sure
why you lasted as long as you did,
and we don't know how long you'll be around.
And there's not much more we can do for you.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Wow.
At 18, that's got to be hard.
HEIDI DOHSE: It was, and so I moved to Maui to windsurf,
because I figured business school was not
going to be as necessary if I wasn't
going to be around very long.
And then the following year, I was
invited to participate in an experimental surgery,
and they electrocuted my AV node,
which is the part of your heart that
coordinates the atrium and the ventricle
and makes it go duh-duh.
And I became 100% pacemaker-dependent,
and that was 30-plus years ago.
So I have been on the cutting edge of pacemaker technology
for about 30 years, and I'm on my seventh one.
LAURENCE MORONEY: On your seventh one.
HEIDI DOHSE: On my seventh one.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Wow.
And now it's like you're not just sitting around
with this pacemaker.
You're doing pretty extreme and intense sports with it, right?
HEIDI DOHSE: I am.
It's interesting, because you have a choice.
You can either be a victim of your condition,
or you can figure out how to do really cool stuff,
even though you've got to deal with it.
So I was a professional windsurfer
when I had the first one put in, and I never considered
myself a heart patient.
I just figured I was a girl with a bad electrical system,
and we fixed it, so I kept doing what I was doing.
But those first heartbeats were really clunky,
and kind of this big cigarette pack of a battery in my chest.
Over the years, the heartbeats have gotten smoother.
There's more sensors built into the pacemaker.
So every time I get a new one, I get new technology.
Just like everything else we do, the technology gets better,
and when people ask, oh, gosh, don't you
wish you could just get it and have it stay in?
It's like, no.
LAURENCE MORONEY: You want the upgrades.
HEIDI DOHSE: I want the upgrades.
LAURENCE MORONEY: For me, I just think about
getting a new phone for the upgrades, but wow.
A new pacemaker.
HEIDI DOHSE: No, I get new heartbeats.
And then the heartbeats do more, and in 2010, due
to unintended consequences of lots of surgeries,
I had to have open heart surgery.
And I decided to be a competitive cyclist.
And that's when this journey of extreme endurance sports
started.
LAURENCE MORONEY: It's not the usual thing
people go is like, I had open heart surgery,
so I'm deciding to become a competitive cyclist.
Where did you make that connection?
HEIDI DOHSE: You know, because I had grown up playing sports,
I didn't want to lose being me.
And I just, I think I was too stubborn to let
heart issues take the life that I really liked away.
So I just thought, what the heck?
Let's see how much I can do.
LAURENCE MORONEY: That's just pretty amazing.
Now one of the things is to be able to cycle
and to enhance your ability to cycle you're using technology.
There's a lot of sensors in the pacemaker,
and you're using that to manage your health.
Can you tell us a little bit about how all of that works?
HEIDI DOHSE: Sure.
So there's a couple of things.
There is what happens inside my chest with the pacemaker,
and that is the pacemaker has a gyroscope.
It has oxygen utilization, muscle stimulation,
electrical impulses.
It takes all of this information and quickly determines,
hey, this is either a tachycardia,
or oh, it's actually exercise.
And it does a bit of machine learning.
So that first 30 minutes of something,
it's kind of taking all this information in and saying,
OK, great, go do what you need to do.
And so if I'm doing a mountain bike race,
and I've got a two-hour climb in front of me,
my pacemaker will know what's going on.
So that's what's happening inside.
But it can still be really scary just mentally for me,
like how hard can I push before I explode something?
Which I'd prefer not to explode something.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah, I can see that.
HEIDI DOHSE: So now we have all these really great wearable
technologies.
We've got between my-- exactly.
So performance athletes, we've had access
to chest straps and the polar devices,
or Garmin has some things, but because of my heart failure
medication and my pacemaker, the chest straps don't work.
So it took a long time until we finally
got to where they have these optical light sensors.
So Mio, Global, couple different companies
make a really great wrist-based heart
rate monitor that I use that I can then determine
when I'm cycling, am I safe?
Am I in that realm that I need to be?
And then also, can I push harder?
What more should I be doing?
And that's how it's really important
to give me the confidence as a heart patient
to feel safe that I can keep doing what I need to do,
and then as an athlete, am I getting the performance
that I should be getting?
Can I train harder?
How much harder can I train?
LAURENCE MORONEY: And now not just athletes
can benefit from this technology, right?
So just the average, everyday person can have a sensor.
HEIDI DOHSE: Exactly.
And I found being a heart patient for as many years
as I've been and having to deal with the initial surgery,
new pacemakers being implanted, open heart surgery,
heart failure, there's a lot of really scary moments.
There's these times where it's like, gosh,
is my heart doing what it's supposed to be doing?
Should I just stay safe, get in the fetal position,
and lay on the couch, because you don't
know what's going on inside.
And with these devices and these sensors and things,
I now have that window inside of what's happening,
so that makes me feel safer.
And with that safety, I'm more confident,
and I'm less apt to have that anxiety that starts to spin,
and then there's anxiety, and the fear turns
into panic attacks, and for anyone
that's ever had a panic attack, you truly
feel like you're dying.
And that can oftentimes, for an individual,
and I've done it myself, that ends up
being a trip to the cardiologist or the emergency room.
There you are consuming these really expensive health care
dollars, because you're just sure
you're having a heart issue, when really you're
kind of having a scary issue.
And the sensors allow you to catch that and stop
that before it turns into an issue.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Right.
And they also, would they allow the doctor to preempt,
instead of maybe you visiting monthly
or every three months or something
like that, that they can take a look at your data constantly,
and then they go, ah, I need to see her now instead of waiting.
HEIDI DOHSE: Exactly.
So two things there is that I can eliminate
having to go in for pacer checks as often, because my Boston
Scientific device has something called the Latitude
Communicator, and it's a passive interrogator
that I can just have in my home.
It's collecting data from my pacemaker
and sending it to my physician, and they can kind of
look at that.
Everything's working as intended.
Big thumbs up.
If not, if there's actually an issue,
they can proactively call me and say, hey,
let's just check that out.
The other thing is that no one ever found my heart issue until
I went in for something else, because it never happens when
you're at the doctor's.
Now people have the ability to collect more information
on their health, and if they do see something that's going on,
they can go to their physician, and they can say,
see this event?
This is what happened.
Here's the actual data, and here's how I felt. Now
it becomes something that's actionable.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Right.
And you find things much quicker, et cetera.
Wow.
And I just still find it amazing though that despite all
of this, despite this background that you've
had that these cycle races that you do, they're tough races.
I saw the one in Vancouver.
You effectively climbed the height of Mount Everest
over the period of a few days.
HEIDI DOHSE: Yeah.
So I just finished-- it's called BC Bike Race,
and it's a seven-day mountain bike stage race,
and it's through some of the most technical mountain
biking in the North Vancouver, Whistler, Squamish
area, kind of the birth of mountain biking.
And we did seven back-to-back days,
over 32,000 feet of climbing--
LAURENCE MORONEY: That's the Mount Everest.
HEIDI DOHSE: Yeah, exactly.
And then this last weekend I just
did Leadville Stage Race, where we were doing
climbs up to over 12,500 feet in elevation.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And technology has made all of this possible.
Obviously, you've put your hard work in as well,
but the technology's been one of the enablers for you.
HEIDI DOHSE: It is.
Without technology, I couldn't be doing what I'm doing.
Without the improvement in technology
that the pacemaker company does, I wouldn't have the heartbeats,
and without the technology that things like our mobile devices,
the sensors allow me as a heart patient to be safe,
and as an athlete to have more performance.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool.
Now you're a developer advocate on the cloud platform.
HEIDI DOHSE: Yes.
LAURENCE MORONEY: How are you bringing your cloud skills
to this?
HEIDI DOHSE: So all this data is great,
but how do you actually get it to the right people?
Well, it has to live in the cloud.
So I look at what we're doing with the Google Cloud Platform
as enabling technology that will really
allow the future of digital health
and customize personal health to happen,
because our Google Cloud Platform
is where the data can be ingested from the devices,
from the doctor's office, from the devices.
It can be analyzed, and then it can be made actionable,
and those actionable bits can be delivered to a health
care professional, researchers, individual patients,
and whoever needs to use it.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And we're really only getting started.
HEIDI DOHSE: We're just getting started.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So it's-- thank you so much.
It's such an inspirational story.
I mean, I find myself like hard to ride my bicycle at times,
and I'm on my zeroth pacemaker.
And so just thanks for the inspiration, and best of luck.
I know you've got some great races coming up soon,
so hopefully we'll get to see a little bit more
of what you do in them, and we'll
get to see a little bit more of how you continue
to use technology to push the edge of how it
can make your life better as well
as other people's life better.
HEIDI DOHSE: Wonderful.
Well, thank you so much.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So thanks, everybody.
I hope you really enjoyed this show as much as I did.
Heidi's just such an inspiration to me,
and it's making me get up off the couch
and ride my bike this weekend.
Thanks, Heidi.
And if you have any questions for me,
or if you have any questions for Heidi,
please just leave them in the comments below.
And if you want to watch any more of the great content
that we have for Google Developers,
take a look at the Google Developers Channel.