Harnessing the Power of Health Tokens

Health permeates every aspect of our daily lives, impacting decisions ranging from what we eat and where we travel to how we shop and relax. Given its ubiquity, health data holds enormous integration potential across a myriad of platforms and use-cases.

Let's explore some potential integration points:

  • Integration Point: Shopping

    • Use Case: With access to your health data, physical supermarkets and online shopping platforms could tailor your shopping experience. For instance, e-commerce platforms could recommend ergonomic furniture suited to your posture or existing medical conditions.

  • Integration Point: Travel Planning

    • Use Case: Informed travel agents could accommodate specific health needs when planning trips. If you're planning a high-altitude journey such as attending DevCON 6 or EthDenver, they could account for how the elevation might affect heart conditions. Allergies or mobility issues could also be factored into your travel plans, ensuring necessities like insulin or wheelchairs are available during your flights.

  • Integration Point: Restaurants and Food Delivery Services

    • Use Case: Restaurants could recommend meals in line with your health profile. People with high blood pressure could be offered low-sodium dishes, while sugar-free options could be suggested for diabetics.

  • Integration Point: Hotel Reservation Systems

    • Use Case: Hotels with access to your health data could ensure your room is equipped with necessary amenities like heaters, air filtration systems, or wheelchair accessibility.

In our current technological landscape, health data sharing often relies on a system like the Health Information Exchange (HIE). HIE works like a key, granting authorized parties — typically healthcare providers — access to a patient's health data. The data is securely shared via a network or blockchain, with the patient's explicit consent. However, this approach presents a challenge; it caters primarily to healthcare providers and doesn't extend to the broader potential integration points mentioned above.

Extending the scope of HIEs to cover the above mentioned integration is not possible. Granting access to user health data to various entities like shopping websites or hotels raises not only privacy concerns but also overburdens the HIE system, increasing its vulnerability to attacks and potential data breaches. Fundamentally, today's health care system is designed with data sharing in mind, not integration.

This is where the concept of a smart health token comes in. Instead of providing direct access, a smart token interacts with these platforms within a computational matrix to provide a desired outcome. For example, a smart health token could query a shopping website for low-sodium products, without giving shopping websites to access user's blood pressure, optimizing the browsing experience for the end-user.

With advancements in AI and cryptography, it's conceivable that an AI assistant could partake in secure multi-party computations on an e-commerce website. This process could generate a personalized shopping list or even facilitate a direct purchase without exposing the query's specifics. While this might require advanced browsers or suitable extensions, such functionality is feasible with programmable smart tokens.

One critical player that stands to revolutionize the integration of health data is wearable technology. Devices like smartwatches and fitness trackers are constantly collecting valuable health data. Imagine your Samsung Galaxy Watch 5, which measures blood pressure, functioning not just as a data reader but also as a data contributor to your health token. This wearable could generate attestations that shape how your health token interacts with various websites and services. They are perfect partners for the health tokens and a primary integration.

Due to the complex nature of health tokens, it's likely they would be implemented as separate tokens with varying footprints on a 'smart layer' network. Health profiles, medication histories, and prescriptions might each exist as distinct tokens. Given the sensitive nature of this data, they would be encrypted and their distributed structure would necessitate the smart layer network to provide on-demand access to different tokens as needed. Health tokens, therefore, could revolutionize how we manage and share health data, giving power back to the users while ensuring privacy.