Could Targeted Medical Information Help Develop Better Devices?

Do you know how your browsing information can be used? Nigel Syrotuck   Five years ago, The New York Times famously ran a piece explaining how Target sent maternity coupons to a customer that they (correctly) inferred was pregnant by examining her purchase history, before she had even told her family about it. More recently, Gizmodo ran a story about a person who was (incorrectly) targeted with a mailed letter inviting her to join a psoriasis clinical trial. Not only did she not have psoriasis, but the only relevance to her was that she had researched psoriasis and other skin care topics online recently. These two stories had opposing conclusions (only one targeted ad was actually correct), but this topic causes a lot of discomfort and leads to a lot of interesting questions. Who sold data to whom? Is this a violation of privacy? Is this against the law? One question in particular sticks out for medical device developers: Can this type of information be leveraged in medical device development? Let’s start with a bit of background. How is user information inferred? Companies seeking to tailor their advertisements to specific people or demographics use a combination of consumer profiles and public information about user devices to first identify the user (not necessarily by name) and then choose how and if to target them. Consumer profiles, in the case of Target, are mostly based on a purchase history that associates a name with a credit card. Scott Phillips and S...
Source: MDDI - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: Design Source Type: news