Info 202 Fall 2011

23andMe and CureTogether – two online services that were inspired by the grass-roots Quantified Self movement – are leveraging the contributions of passionate users to create a continuously growing pool of anonymized data that they can mine in order to draw scientific conclusions and present health recommendations for consumers in an organized and accessible format. Typically medical studies are extremely costly, time-consuming, and difficult, regardless of whether one is researching common or esoteric condition but the hope here is that crowd-sourcing and data-mining will enable them to leverage network effects and reach faster results.