technology
Falling for blockchain
How the technology behind
cryptocurrency could
revolutionise healthcare.
on all prior transactions. And then
the whole network can check and
make sure that the network is doing
what it is supposed to do, and no one
is misbehaving.
Steven Strange, CEO and co-founder
of Health Metrics, believes blockchain
has many applications beyond currency.
Recently, he published a paper looking into
its efficacy in predicting falls in aged care.
Aged Care Insite spoke with Strange to
find out more.
Steven Strange interviewed by Conor Burke
ACI: What is blockchain technology?
B
itcoin was last year’s craze for
investors around the world. It
may have taken a hit this year, but
the technology behind it could be the
real winner.
Bitcoin was founded by the mysterious
Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 when he
published the white paper, ‘Bitcoin: A Peer
to Peer Electronic Cash System’. Not long
after, he released the first Bitcoins and the
accompanying software.
According to the original Bitcoin white
paper, the system was set up as a “purely
peer-to-peer version of electronic cash
[that] would allow online payments
to be sent directly from one party to
another without going through a financial
institution”. It is viewed by its champions as
a utopian vision of a monetary future.
Yet it’s the blockchain technology
that allows all cryptocurrencies to
run that is of most interest to experts
around the world. Blockchain is a
ledger that everyone can see, verifying
all the information. In the case of
cryptocurrency, it runs a series of
cryptographic proofs every 10 minutes
34 agedcareinsite.com.au
SS: Blockchain is a consensus protocol.
What that means is that it’s peer-to-
peer; there’s no specific server involved,
typically. It allows people to validate and
give integrity to transactions that are
occurring in any particular data ecosystem.
It’s a much better way of validating that
something actually happened.
In the case of cryptocurrency or
anything else – a contract, an insurance
policy – it means that what is yours is
yours. And other people can’t possibly
tamper with the integrity of what’s yours.
Where did the idea that blockchain could
be used to predict falls come from?
Health Metrics is doing work with Monash
University in Melbourne, and we’re helping
supervise and assist a PhD student. She
was standing on the shoulders of my
particular work in that space, and what is
a very core passion of mine, and that is to
look at how we can alleviate the problems
of falls. Particularly in residential aged care,
particularly with the elderly, where those
falls are avoidable by the use of technology
and predictive algorithms.
It’s my belief that if we could make even
small inroads into that, the wins are huge
for all players – the residents especially,
because you know what happens when
you fall: you break your hip, you have an
expensive hospital visit and then you die.
We really want to get rid of avoidable
falls. We’re optimistic that at some point
we’ll be able to produce technology that
makes really big inroads into that space.
Via the help of the people from Monash,
we’re doing a lot of the heavy lifting around
blockchain, particularly as a mechanism
for selecting the initial data and ensuring
that it’s valid and that it’s cross-platform.
The data doesn’t just have to come from
the customers of Health Metrics. The
more data we have, the more valid our
predictions become. If we can make a
reduction of 5–10 per cent – not a highly
ambitious target – it could bring billions
to the economy.
What were the findings of your paper?
It’s early days. The paper is the beginning
of the end; in fact, it’s the very beginning.
Remember, our Health Metrics target is to
be preventive, not just predictive – there’s
a subtle difference. So, this paper is about
creating the foundations and framework
to the data collection. From that, we can
go into preprocessing, then analytics, then
predictive. I want Health Metrics to provide
the community with technology. We’re
going to make this all open-source. We’re
happy for our competitors and everyone
to use it, because we think there’s so much
of a community good to it. We’re not going
to patent it.
Is Health Metrics working on anything
specific?
Our target is to have on any device,
anywhere, any time, the ability for, say, a
carer in an aged car setting to be alerted