HWAI
How Weird am I?
(how weird are you??)
The idea for this project came out of working in this field as a data scientist for the last ~decade. Right now there is a TON of money thrown being around (in industry, academia, and at non-profits) with the goal of developing "biomarkers" to improve treatment of human diseases. In most cases, that money goes toward building datasets by collecting lots biological data (often with cutting-edge "omics" platforms), in order to profile a study population in the range of dozens to hundreds of people.
For some things that approach makes sense - if you want to help people with lupus, measuring proteins/genes/cell composition in the blood might help better define the biology and inform a therapuetic treatment. For mental health, this aproach makes a lot less sense. For things like depression, anxiety, traumatic stress, - there's huge potential for data to inform treatments and help people get better, but gene exression in the blood is a lot less helpful to differentiating types of depression or axiety.
For that, it makes more sense to build a dataset of behavioral/symptom data. Basically just ask people about their habits, personality, beliefs, and mental health over time. Collect data from as many people as you can, to account for "noise" in the diversity of people's brains, and collect it over time, to account for noise from the fact that people's lives vary over time.
The funny thing is, it wouldn't cost millions to do this - only the hosting fees to run this web-site, and volunteers to put up flyers here and there.
So yeah, if you took the baseline survey - awesome, you already helped build this thing that could help people some day. If you want to keep going and answer more questions, even better. And feel free to check back in once in a while - I'll be updating with weird / interesting findings every few months or so.
...for a long(er)-winded take on these ideas, see here.
For some things that approach makes sense - if you want to help people with lupus, measuring proteins/genes/cell composition in the blood might help better define the biology and inform a therapuetic treatment. For mental health, this aproach makes a lot less sense. For things like depression, anxiety, traumatic stress, - there's huge potential for data to inform treatments and help people get better, but gene exression in the blood is a lot less helpful to differentiating types of depression or axiety.
For that, it makes more sense to build a dataset of behavioral/symptom data. Basically just ask people about their habits, personality, beliefs, and mental health over time. Collect data from as many people as you can, to account for "noise" in the diversity of people's brains, and collect it over time, to account for noise from the fact that people's lives vary over time.
The funny thing is, it wouldn't cost millions to do this - only the hosting fees to run this web-site, and volunteers to put up flyers here and there.
So yeah, if you took the baseline survey - awesome, you already helped build this thing that could help people some day. If you want to keep going and answer more questions, even better. And feel free to check back in once in a while - I'll be updating with weird / interesting findings every few months or so.