The backdrop of all of this is that because of Cohack we got Dr. Ho. UC Berkeley is really excited, “How do we do US-Taiwan study of public health?” so today, mainly, I want to ask for your help navigating.

She’s like, “If I saw these numbers I couldn’t sleep at night. What are we doing?”

She’s a full-on mentor. She’s awesome. She’s like, “Look at these figures.” She’s like, “I’m not a medical person. I’m public health, but look at these numbers.”

We’ve been meeting with her at least once a week since then.

You got it. That’s what she wants to do. She doesn’t know software. I’m like, “OK, we know software. We don’t know health and nutrition.”

We originally wanted her help with Cohack, but then as we talked the stuff that Casey and I are interested in, both physical health, mental health, before we spoke about the social media…

From the youngest of age my mom always told me about the benefits of nutrition. “Take care of your health. Your health is the most important thing.”

She’s so awesome. This is recorded. It will come out the wrong way, but she reminds so much of my mom.

I can’t afford her.

We’re doing all kinds of cool stuff to combine nutrition.

The new stuff we’re doing with our app now relates to nutrition, so she was showing us from age 7 to age 12 the youth in Taiwan already have the biomarkers for prediabetes. It was blowing my mind.

Yeah. Out of Cohack came two amazing things. First is we met Dr. Ho at Sinica. She has been a huge help.

People. People’s data. Both.

You got it.

Berkeley really wants to work with Taiwan. They think that there’s this amazing cohort in Taiwan that they would love to be able to study.

We did work with them three years ago. They have a new Dean now, and so these past two weeks it’s been nonstop meetings, trying to figure out how we can help. There’s a bunch of really good stuff there.

Thank you. Thank you. It really helped with UC Berkeley. The School of Public Health there is tasked with how to reopen the campus.

…I’m actually super excited about Cohack.

Bye-bye.

Good night.

[laughs] I love the idea. We’ve definitely got to make a comic. Take care.

That’s really interesting. Audrey, thank you again for your time, really appreciate being able to reach out to you and talk to you about this.

That’s a really cool idea. This is great. Awesome. I’ve seen people do that with fair use at Duke. The Center for the Study of the Public Domain did a graphic comic around explaining fair use to artists. It was really cool. This really is a complicated concept.

That’s a cool idea.

I’ve heard that.

That’s very cool. Specifically for our app, is there anything that we could do that would get us prepared at least more for the GDPR side? Is there anything us, as a team, could do to integrate which would get us directionally going there? Any kind of low-hanging fruit that ...

Yeah, yeah. It just feels like there’s enough elements that are there technically. If there’s anyone that you knew that you’d be like, hey, you should talk to them, work together…If there’s pieces that are connecting in your mind, we’d love to help out with this. This is just a ...

Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, this is like the democratic alternative to…Well, we’re being recorded, so I shouldn’t say the country, but this is the democratic alternative to…

Totally.

Taiwan is becoming seen, at least in a lot of countries now, as a leader. What I was thinking was, well, is there an opportunity to not just be a leader, but take another step even further and do this sort of open data health network where the citizens have ...

Do you feel that there’s a path? As an outsider…Actually both Casey and I are foreigners here. A lot of my friends lately in the US have been calling me and they said, “Hey, can you tell me more about what Taiwan does?” because they’ve been so fascinated with how ...

What we were trying to do with this app that Casey demoed was to show almost a vertical slice. It had all of the components, essentially an application built on top of a data vault, and connecting all of the individuals at a community level to sort of prove out ...

We worked with them on that, Audrey. Our protocol’s beneath that.

The developers that use this network could pay a tax, essentially. Part of the tax could fund the health system. At the same time, leftover money could actually go back to the citizens. I’m wondering. Is that kind of idea interesting to you? Or is it too crazy, too far ...

All of the data from the hospitals could be put into it. Then there could be an opt-in almost where they could create an open data network where other apps and services could build on top of it, almost like a government app store.

OK, cool. There’s a financial model that I’ve found interesting. I have one of the NHI cards, so I pay into the national health pool. One idea would be to offer almost like a premium health, where individuals, back-of-the-envelope numbers, if they paid $500 NT per month, something, they would ...

Essentially, you have something that looks like a next-generation health system. Citizens could own their data. They would form these networks.

I love that idea. That’s super interesting. While we were working through this, we had a crazy idea. I want to share the crazy idea with you. If this sort of app works, the network architecture, the topology, if you will, would be a lot of individual people with encrypted ...

400 is really interesting. It’s, of course, bigger than Dunbar’s number, but not by too much.

400 people?

Interesting. Is there anything that you have felt that we can learn from our peers in these crises? When you have a pandemic, is there anything peer-to-peer that you feel is super valuable?

Is it the district? Is it the neighborhood? Is there some boundary that you feel would be very interesting for people to help one another in?

My brother and I are always calling them saying, “Do not go out. Stay in the home.” It’s really, really bad right now in the area where they live. This idea of individuals helping each other in the community is something that I personally find very interesting. I’m wondering, are ...

Interesting. I think this is actually a bigger problem in the US. Taiwan is pretty stable right now. My parents, in their neighborhood, some of our neighbors have come by and they asked, “If you need help, we can go to the store. We can buy things for you,” because ...

A couple of questions I had for you would be, what useful information could you think of that an individual could provide? A citizen could provide if they felt it could stay private? Would there be any useful information related to, say, COVID-19?

There’s some very simple biomarkers, I guess you would say, that we thought we could do things with but we can also start it much less personal where you’re providing this direct connection between different institutions and an individual and not go directly into the health so quickly.

The health data we were actually interested in was sleep and exercise because these two can be really telling as to…For example, resting heartbeat oftentimes goes up when people are getting close to being sick.

People would be able to know, in the neighborhoods around them, what’s going on and to be able to make suggestions like which parks to go to if the weather is good. If somebody works in, say, area B and lives in area C, to be able to tell them ...

What about location? We’ve looked into a lot of ways of how you can have private location, still do geofencing.

It could be web based. The challenge is on the privacy side. How do you keep an individual’s data very, very secure, keep the private keys very safe? The phone is super easy to do that kind of stuff, but I think it could be web based, too.