Innovative Ideas! Possibilities for the next 20 years!

Given the world today, my innovation revolves around technology becoming a more powerful asset in preventing future pandemics. Throughout my lifetime, I have only witnessed prosperity, growth, enablement, and comfort. I have never had exposure to world war, economic depression, hunger, or natural disaster. Although many tragic events have unfolded during my lifetime, most have been distanced and admittedly not drastically changing my daily life. An article written by a college student, Alyssa Ahlgren, debates Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's belief that the entire millennial generation has never witnessed American prosperity (Ahlgren, 2019). While I appreciate the diverse perspectives of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, I have only experienced prosperity. 

However, the current COVID-19 pandemic has introduced a destructive force, at a global level, that in some way affects everyone. I see children, my own included, now being deprived of rich, interactive educations and social environments that only months ago were commonplace. I see relationships between family and friends distanced due to the lack of personal engagement. I see family, friends, and my community economically impacted to unrecoverable levels. Finally, I see my wife come home every day from working as a registered nurse with frustration, anger, and painful heartache the pandemic has caused. I hear people refer to "post-pandemic" norms and the return of life as we knew it. The question is, will we ever return to "normal"?  I believe an enormous impact of the pandemic is the loss of time. Time is the one element that cannot be bought, stored, or retrieved. It was Benjamin Franklin that stated, "Lost time is never found again."

I want to anchor back to this discussion board's purpose and share an innovative idea of using technology to prevent future events as destructive as COVID-19. As technology offers hope towards earlier detection, testing, inoculation, and treatment, the prospects are incredible, improving public safety at global levels (Wang et al., 2020). However, we need to imagine a world where technology helps identify and address the disease well before it ever reaches pandemic levels.  Prevention, not the reaction to a pandemic, is the goal. Through the combination of forces, technical, cultural, environmental, and social, significant research and learnings already exist. Research organizations such as the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are working on new and emerging solutions to all aspects of disease prevention (PNNL Researchers Confront COVID-19 Challenges, 2021).

Specifically, two exciting forces that define innovation of disease detection and prevention include technological and social entities. The technological forces driving innovation are in full strength. The key to advancement in multiple areas resides in the maturation of Big Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning. In Obermeyer and Emanuel (2016), medical doctors identify these technologies as the future of clinical medicine. The trend must continue and research-driven to address the most difficult challenges. Secondly, social forces resulting from the pandemic are emerging and addressing problems in new ways by leveraging and extending promising practices. Examples specific to healthcare include developing economically viable pain care models, telehealth, virtual visits, and outcomes-based clinical care models (Gallagher, 2021). Simultaneously, innovative thinking is inspiring and can drive ideas forward leverage forces used as a springboard to develop new solutions.

Pandemics represent a growing threat to humans' health across the planet stemming from the rise of emerging disease events that ignite them.  COVID-19 is an example of an uncertain path and growth curve that results in economic collapse, mental health disorders, illness, and death while the global population waits for a vaccine.   Pandemics originate from a diverse collection of microbes found in animal reservoirs with emergence driven by human activities.  The unsustainable exploitation of the environment due to change, expansion, wildlife trade are all human factors driving pandemics (Workshop Report on Biodiversity and Pandemics of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), 2020). 

The intent of my work this term is to illustrate how Big Data Analytics can drive pandemic prevention in the next decade through discovery, automation, and critical decision making.  While the topic domain appears overwhelming, the sensation is complementary to futurism.

References

Ahlgren, A. (2019). College Student: My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity Around Us. Foundation for Economic Education. https://fee.org/articles/college-student-my-generation-is-blind-to-the-prosperity-around-us/

 

Gallagher, R. M. (2021). The Social Forces Healing Patients with Painful Conditions: What Happens After COVID-19? Pain Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1093/pm/pnaa486

 

Obermeyer, Z., & Emanuel, E. J. (2016). Predicting the Future - Big Data, Machine Learning, and Clinical Medicine. The New England journal of medicine, 375(13), 1216-1219. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp1606181

 

PNNL Researchers Confront COVID-19 Challenges. (2021).  https://www.pnnl.gov/covid

 

Wang, C. J., Ng, C. Y., & Brook, R. H. (2020). Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan: Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing. JAMA, 323(14), 1341-1342. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.3151

 

Workshop Report on Biodiversity and Pandemics of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). (2020). I. Secretariat.  https://doi.org10.5281/zenodo.4311798