A Navigational Approach to Health: Actionable Guidance for Improved Quality of Life

TL;DR

This paper proposes a Personal Health Navigation framework that uses continuous measurements and estimations to guide individuals towards health goals, emphasizing proactive management over disease treatment.

Contribution

It introduces a navigational paradigm for health management that integrates multi-modal data and real-time guidance to improve quality of life.

Findings

Framework enables continuous health monitoring and guidance.

Supports personalized, goal-oriented health management.

Facilitates proactive health optimization rather than reactive treatment.

Abstract

Lifestyle and environment interacting with our biological machine are primarily responsible for shaping our health and wellbeing. Continuous, multi-modal, and quantitative approaches to understanding and controlling these factors will allow each person to better reach their desired quality of life. A navigational paradigm can help users towards a specified health goal by using constantly captured measurements to feed estimations of how a user's health is continuously changing in order to provide actionable guidance. As various actions are taken by the user, measurements of the resulting effects loop back into the estimation and the next step of guidance. This perpetual cycle of measuring, estimating, guiding, and acting articulates a Personal Health Navigation information and actuation framework. Personal Health Navigation focuses on fulfilling a user's health goals by ensuring minimal deviation from healthy states, rather than treating disease or symptoms after derailment from proper biological function.