Your data will improve your health

Text: Afram Yakoub, Communications Manager, SwedenBIO

How to best leverage personal data is top of mind for Dr Mikael Mattsson, CEO of Svexa and a researcher at Stanford University and RISE. At NLSDays in Copenhagen on November 29-30, 2023, he will moderate a supersession focused on the use of data in disease prevention, diagnostics, and precision health.

Dr Mattsson has broad experience in digital and precision health and focuses his research activities on the optimization and individualization of exercise and physical training. His company, Silicon Valley Exercise Analytics (SVExA), helps athletes optimize their training and results through the use of personal health data.

Working with elite athletes has produced valuable insights for Dr Mattsson when it comes to the practical use of personal health data and implementing digital tools in healthcare. One of the most important aspects from his point of view is ownership of health data. Using the sports world as an example, he points out:

“In the sports industry, the value of sharing data is obvious. If a player moves to a new team and the data collected about them doesn’t follow them, they will have to start from scratch. By sharing data, the new club will have all the historical data and can make better decisions about the player’s value to the team. It would be easier for the new club to have all the historical data, and the new player would be more valuable if the club knew more about that person,” he says.

Personal ownership of health data is also important for the general population, especially in health systems consisting of different national, regional, and local entities. In Sweden, for example, regions and counties are responsible for different parts of the health system. While regions have medical data from hospitals, counties oversee preventive and elderly care. Having personal health data attached to the individual is therefore the best solution, according to Dr Mattsson.

“In such a system, it would be a lot easier if you could have your data attached to you so you can choose with whom to share it. It could be your orthopedic surgeon, it might be your physio, or the elderly care center could access your medical history to make better assessments and understand your health status based on the data,” he explains.

The European Health Data Space is an ongoing initiative from the European Commission to set regulations for owning and sharing health data. Mikael recognizes the complexity of existing rules and regulations but emphasizes one fundamental principle for precision health.

“In the future, you, as an individual, must own all your own data. You must be able to revoke access from someone, and you must be able to give access to someone,” Dr Mattsson says.

“It’s up to you to share it with whoever you want. It’s not a government thing. If I want to share it with my doctor in a different country, that’s none of the government’s business. And if you frame it like that, then it’s more of a security question—how do we make sure that my data is not leaked by someone?”

Finding the signal in the data tsunami

With the ability to collect vast amounts of data, a new challenge arises. While the past problem was a lack of personal health data, today’s challenge is making sense of the massive volume of collected data.

“Nowadays, we’re in a situation where people have more and more data. If you combine the data, the problem is how do you find the signal in all of it? If I have your activity data from your Apple Watch, your sleep data from your Oura ring, your Vera Labs blood tests every six months, your medical record, and your psychologist’s evaluation, how do I know what’s relevant in all this data? That’s what we call the data tsunami,” explains Dr Mattsson.

Clinicians, when faced with this situation, are forced to focus only on a narrow set of data they know is relevant. They often ignore other data simply because they don’t know how to process it. Manually sorting through all the information to find the “signal” is not a viable option.

To solve this issue, digital systems are needed to analyze data and detect important patterns. The demand for such AI-driven solutions is increasing, making this an attractive field for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) developing innovative technologies.

Say hello to your future digital twin

Having digital systems that can combine multiple data streams and help clinicians detect meaningful insights is crucial, but the possibilities of precision health go even further, as Dr Mattsson’s work with athletes demonstrates. He is among the researchers pushing the digital twin concept—creating virtual models of athletes based on real-world health data.

A digital twin consists of numbers and values derived from an individual’s real-world health data. It is a holistic analytical system that integrates diverse data points to generate real-time, personalized readiness metrics. This system can simulate an athlete’s performance under different conditions. By running thousands of virtual scenarios, a digital twin helps determine the optimal training plan.

“An Olympic athlete trains for four years and then has one shot at it, hoping to achieve peak performance at exactly the right time. But that’s incredibly difficult. There are countless examples of athletes breaking world records just days or weeks after the Olympics. With a digital twin, you can test thousands of different approaches and scenarios to find the best result, and then follow that path,” Dr Mattsson explains.

This approach isn’t just for elite athletes—it has broader applications for the general population.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s an athlete training for the Olympics to shave tenths of a second off their time or someone optimizing their routine to lower their blood pressure. What we can see is that individual variations in how we react to different factors are huge,” he says.

A call for vision and innovative thinking at NLSDays

The supersession at NLSDays will explore data usage from multiple perspectives. In addition to discussing how innovative SMEs leverage data, Dr Mattsson hopes to highlight the role of big tech companies like Apple and Microsoft in enabling data analysis. Another key discussion point will be how EU regulators manage data collection and access.

Above all, he calls for a focus on vision and innovation at the main Nordic life science event of the year:

“At NLSDays, I hope we can focus on how to improve people’s lives with data rather than just on the hurdles. I want to see vision and innovative thinking. I hope for a positive outlook and interesting ideas in the supersession on how to handle data and, more importantly, how this data can benefit us as humans and individuals.”