Transcriber: Francesca Morello Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
First of all, I have to say that I am super nervous,
so I apologize if I do something wrong.
Three years ago,
I was checking my blood with the medical service
and I found myself that my blood was really bad.
I had really high cholesterol, high glucose,
all kind of things!
The doctor I knew told me that
I was a few steps away from hell, if the hell really exists.
And at the same time, similar time
my girlfriend, now wife,
she got affected by a severe flu,
and it was originally thought that this was H1N1,
the swine flue, that some of you probably know.
So, it was the first time in my life
that I realized that our body
feedbacks to any kind of things:
the thing you eat,
the people you met,
the disease you got infected with,
that your body, that our body is really slow.
So I'll give you an example,
before, like three years ago,
I'd have three dishes of rice a meal,
that caused my blood to be really bad.
So it took years for me to have nine rices a day
and it caused my blood [to be] really bad.
So, as a technologist, or a geek or a nerd,
or whatever you want to call it,
I thought to myself,
how could we respond to our sickness faster.
So it tricked me and our team members at the company
to work with friends and partners,
[unclear] foundation, [unclear] promotion foundation
and [unclear] in Bankok
to develop the app that allows people to do
personal treatment to their body.
It is called Doctor [unclear],
we have about 300,000 users right now.
So, this application will try to help users
to do self-treatment when they have a sickness.
And, we've run this platform for about 2 years
and we got 300,000 users,
and we think more, during the past year,
we think more how could we utilize these users
and this movement and these devices
to be a participatory platform.
One thing that we saw
is changing in our life time is this picture
These two pictures say everything about the movement,
the digital movement in our lives.
The above picture was taken in 2005,
during the Pope election in the Vatican,
and you can see that it's only
a single Nokia on the left side there
that is taking the picture. Sorry for that.
But in 2013, the beginning of this year,
another Pope election in Vatican.
You can see people holding square light and taking photos.
So we see that people stepping in to digital world
and digital devices are in our life now.
And the other thing that I think, is this important
about public health.
When we talk about public health, in any language,
in English and in Thai language, it's about 'public' and about 'health',
but right now public health never belongs to the public.
So it is about [unclear] of working,
and how could we make the public health more collaborative.
I'm interested in public health because right now
it is the trick that could eradicate humans.
If you imagine about SARS, in 1995 I think,
bird flue in the beginning of this millennium,
swine flu in 2009,
or even in fictional movie, contagion can eradicate half of humans
when was that, two months ago,
it eradicates most of us [and we] become running zombies.
"The walking dead", my most favorite [show],
people become zombies because of a virus.
So this is an important issue that,
the ministry of public health is working on it.
I'm not sure if they're trying to detect the zombie virus,
(Laughter)
but they are detecting things that could kill all of us.
So what I think is,
what if we could synergy the power of this government and citizens together
to the Participatory Disease Surveillance?
When we talk about surveillance
I need to be clear, it's not about watching you there,
it is not about stealing your personal information,
but to monitor the disease in the society.
Right now there are Participatory Disease Movements in the world
there are 3 continents that are working on this:
In the United States, there's a system called "Flu Near You",
where people report their symptoms,
their sickness to the system
and it is not a government system,
so that people can worry a little bit less,
hassle-free about reporting.
"Influenzanet" in the European continent,
and "Flutracker" in Australia.
The idea is about to get collective information of people's sickness
and find a signal of the next emerging diseases
or some new virus, faster or before it happens.
And right now, you can see, South American continent
African continent, Asian continent, are still left behind.
So, I and partners in those systems
are now thinking about how we could detect that faster
and it has become self reporting thinking about digital volunteerism.
So when we talk about volunteerism,
it is not only you standing in the sun
and doing something for the society, for your community.
But it is also about contributing
some of your anonymous data that could benefit your community too.
It's about you who becomes a part of collaborative problem solving
which is disease detection.
So we are thinking about designing
this simple set of questions that could empower the public health system
both from the government side and citizen side.
So it is very simple, if we ask all of you here,
"How do you feel?",
"Are you sick or are you fine?",
if you're fine, you check fine, so there is nothing here.
But if you check you are sick,
there should be a check marck there,
and there are more symptoms to be answered on the mobile phone.
Right now we work on eleven symptoms
that we could group together to specify some diseases.
For example, like, you have headache, stomachache, nausea, red-eye, rash,
all those kinds of things that could become a part of collective data
collection about sickness.
So when we imagine that everybody has a mobile phone,
and we have to set up questions, simple questions
that you can ask the citizens,
plus some anonymous health parameters,
for example your gender, your age
- we don't want to know your name or mobile phone or email address -
plus approximately location,
when we talk about location, it will be a postal code,
a zip code or like a ten radius km, a district or subdistrict,
and you can imagine plus with a lot of people reporting the same thing.
For example, the people in this room,
if we have half of the people in this room
reporting they have a headache,
because of the air-conditioning so cold, I am checking right now,
we could send some signal
that there could be something happening.
So I think from this mechanism,
we could detect the next zombie apocalypse faster.
Thank you!
(Applause)