TOOLS FOR HEALTH AND WELLNESS

• US 20070112598A1
• Filed: 11/02/2006
• Published: 05/17/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 11/04/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Jojic, Nebojsa, Hinrichs, Randy, Heckerman, David, Mundie, Craig
• Granted Patent: US 7,647,285 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 705/2
• CPC Class Codes: G06N 20/00 Machine learning
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/10 Office automation; Time management
• CPC Class Codes: G16H 10/20 for electronic clinical trials or questionnaires
• CPC Class Codes: G16H 10/60 for patient-specific data, e.g. for electronic patient records
• CPC Class Codes: G16H 50/20 for computer-aided diagnosis, e.g. based on medical expert systems
• CPC Class Codes: G16H 50/70 for mining of medical data, e.g. analysing previous cases of other patients

Abstract

A tool for providing health and/or wellness services is described herein. Not necessarily clean or unclean data about a plurality of self-selected or non-selected or unselected subjects is received. The data can be aggregated and mined at least in part by employing a statistical algorithm, a data-mining algorithm and/or a machine-learning algorithm. The data can be further employed to provide health and/or wellness services to participants.

Claims

1. A method of providing health and/or wellness services, comprising:

receiving data about a plurality of self-selected subjects, the data being not necessarily clean;

aggregating at least some of the data;

mining at least some of the aggregated data at least in part by employing a statistical algorithm, a data-mining algorithm and/or a machine-learning algorithm;

receiving a health and/or wellness related inquiry from one of the plurality of self-selected subjects; and

drawing an inference about the health and/or wellness of the one of the plurality of self-selected subjects based on data received about the one of the plurality of self-selected subjects and the health and/or wellness inquiry.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein drawing the inference about the health and/or wellness of the one of the plurality of self-selected subjects is further based at least in part on clean data.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein the clean data is from one or more of a randomized clinical trial, a controlled clinical trial, a double-blind clinical trial, a double-blind, randomized, controlled clinical trial and a meta-analysis of two or more clinical trials.

4. The method of claim 1, further comprising providing the inference to the one of the plurality of self-selected subjects.

5. The method of claim 1, further comprising receiving a benefit for drawing the inference about the health and/or wellness of the one of the plurality of self-selected subjects.

6. The method of claim 5, wherein the benefit is a monetary benefit.

7. The method of claim 6, wherein the monetary benefit is one or more of advertising revenue and a fee paid by the one of the plurality of self-selected subjects.

8. The method of claim 1, further comprising providing at least some of the plurality of self-selected subjects with at least one incentive to self-select to supply the data.

9. The method of claim 1, further comprising providing a referral to a health-care provider based on the inference.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein the inference is one or more of a diagnosis and a treatment option.

11. A system that facilitates providing health and/or wellness services, comprising:

a database to store unclean health-related data gathered on a large-scale and relating to a non-selected population;

an aggregation component to facilitate automatically ascertaining at least one pattern from the unclean health-related data, the aggregation component automatically ascertaining the at least one pattern from the unclean health-related data at least in part by applying a statistical technique, a data mining technique and/or a machine-learning technique to the database;

a query component to receive information from a user, the user being one of the non-selected population; and

a decision component to employ the information received from the user and at least some of the unclean health-related data relating to the user to provide health and/or wellness self-help to the user.

12. The system of claim 11 implemented on a single server.

13. The system of claim 11 implemented on two or more servers.

14. The system of claim 11, wherein the information received from the user is one or more of a drug-related event, a symptom, a device output, an activity, and patient-specific genetic information.

15. The system of claim 11, wherein the query component implicitly collects at least some of the information received from the user.

16. The system of claim 11, wherein the query component automatically collects at least some of the information received from the user.

17. The system of claim 11, wherein the query component collects at least some of the information received from the user by prompting the user with at least one question.

18. The system of claim 17, wherein the query component determines one or more follow-up questions to present to the user based on the user'"'"'s answer to the at least one question.

19. The system of claim 11, wherein the unclean health-related data is provided by entities interfacing with the system via an Application Programming Interface.

20. An online system to facilitate providing health and/or wellness assistance, comprising:

means for obtaining unclean medical data from an unselected population via the Internet;

means for automatically drawing conclusions from the unclean medical data, the means for automatically drawing conclusions from the unclean medical data employing a statistical algorithm, a machine-learning algorithm, a data-mining algorithm and/or an artificial-intelligence algorithm to draw at least one conclusion from the unclean medical data;

means for receiving a query from a member of the unselected population; and

means for providing the member of the unselected population with a conclusion based on at least the query and at least some of the unclean medical data relating to the member of the unselected population.