One of the promises of big data is better event predictions. A prediction has a percentage confidence interval, but the outcome is binary, the event either happens or not, as anyone who has gone “all-in” with pocket aces and lost knows. The win was, however, highly probable. So what.
Talk to any fertility expert and they will eventually get around to talking about probabilities too. There is a data model for getting pregnant and Glow is distributing just that to want-to-be parents. Glow is also demonstrating a very practical application for two other modern trends: crowd-funding and the “quantifiable self” (more on this in the future). Couples pay $50/month to use the Glow application and monitoring system, which provides ongoing predictive information for the ideal times for a couple to attempt to reproduce, among other things (if you click on the website the FAQ section will take you through the necessary data inputs, but body temperature is one of the inputs, for example).
The $50/month contribution is held in a funding pool. If a successful pregnancy doesn’t occur within 10 months that couple gets pro-rata funding from the pool to go against the cost of fertility treatment. How much money is in the funding pool? All of the money paid in by couples that did succeed in getting pregnant within 10 months.
The bet is that, over time, with more data and experience, the Glow application will give couples better advice and enable a greater percentage of natural pregnancies, leaving more money in the pool to help finance those couples that absolutely need fertility treatments.
Here’s the link. Please check it out. I think it’s a very important idea.
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