My ideating friend, Abel Viageiro of Mozambique, was pondering the ways technology could be used to better handle pandemics. Which reminded me of some work my small company, Amzi!, was involved in back in the late 1990s.
War Fighter
The work was for a part of the Army involved in medical technology, and was called the “war fighter” project. The idea was that you put intelligent devices on soldiers that could monitor various health aspects, and then communicate to a local net so that the commanding officer could see the data, which could then be aggregated at different steps and sent up the chain of command. (This was how Abel was thinking, using the Internet of Things and other network ideas.)
The data would be used for various things, one being triage, knowing which soldiers were not going to live, and which had a good chance of survival. The other being that the commanding officer would know the health status of his immediate command, who was still in fighting shape, who wasn’t. Other general health data, such as fatigue, would also be aggregated so higher up the command they would know which units would be most effective to deploy in combat.
Where did we fit in? We were a vender of tools for adding AI rules in network environments. These would aid in the decision making up and down the chain of command.
That project ended, at least for us, prematurely when our sponsor, Fred, in the military died. I don’t know anything about whether the project went to completion or not, or if anything like it is being used today.
Military Spending in the Clinton Years
Fred was also the sponsor of an earlier project that we did complete. It was an online, breast cancer decision support system that helped thousands of women understand and navigate through the course of treatment for that disease. It won us an award from the Smithsonian and the Washington Post said it was the only Internet application worth anything at the time. This was in the 1990s.
Why was this work done for the military? There was a lesson in politics in the project. It was part of how Bill Clinton fulfilled two contradictory campaign promises: 1- reduce military spending and 2- not reduce spending on our military. He did this in part by defunding a center for cancer research and giving those contracts to the Army. So Fred, in the military, was getting funding for non-military work on cancer.
The project was also a lesson on internal politics. These were Fred’s pet projects, which he nurtured and saw through. When he died, ironically of cancer, a brain tumor, nobody else stepped up to take over “his” projects. So the funding stopped. He was a bit of a cowboy, an outside-the-box thinker (for the 1990s) and no-one else in his area quite had his vision.
Marketing AI in the 1990s
We got involved with Fred as the result of our work trying to capitalize on integrating two relatively new (1990s) technologies, AI and the Web. We had developed a product we called WebLS (Web Logic Server) that was an easy to use tool that allowed developers to encode decision making rules into a Web site. (for online diagnostics, sales recommendations, advice giving, etc.)
We were going to make our fortune selling these at $99 each. We had ads in all the right places. And we waited. We didn’t get a single sale, not even a single inquiry. It seemed nobody cared.
Except Fred. He was the only one who saw our well-placed ads and saw the tool’s potential, as eventually realized in the breast cancer system.
It always seemed strange to me, WebLS didn’t generate a single $99 sale but led to a number of years of government contract work that, while not making us rich, definitely contributed to the retirement I’m currently enjoying.
And Now for Something Completely Different
To be clear about the breast cancer system, we were not experts in breast cancer treatment. We developed the software framework for the system, which was then used, with our help, by medical experts to encode the actual knowledge the system provided. In other words, we understood AI and the Web and worked with others who understood breast cancer treatment.
As part of that work we were in interviews with the various specialists that might be involved, such as surgeons, ontologists, radiologists, psychologists and others.
It was all very technical and somewhat dry, but the interview with the psychologist at Walter Reed made a big impression on me, given my fascination with mind/body health issues (see Reflection).
He said (this is just that one psychologist’s opinion at the time) that the women who had breast cancer fit a similar psychological profile. They had emotionally given totally of themselves for the lives of people close to them, their husbands, children, parents, etc. Those who reacted to the disease by making changes in their lives, paying more attention to maybe their own needs, had a much greater chance of survival than those who didn’t.
I did, by chance, get a second opinion on this a number of years later. I had just casually met a doctor who was involved in cancer research at Duke University. I had asked about what he did, and in a relatively dry and boring way he was relating to me some of the medical research he was doing.
It occurred to me to see what his reaction would be to my story of the psychologist. I didn’t expect his reaction. He suddenly lit up, became very animated and said, yes, yes, that’s it exactly, said how important it is to change the way one’s living in order to survive, and went on to tell me of his wife’s work that was very much involved with that side of it.
These ideas are scary, nobody wants to hear them. Dry medical information is much more comforting. The psychologist never explained his emotional profile idea to a patient directly, but instead tried to gently steer them towards new paths or attitudes in life.
And so, interesting anecdotes about the mind/body connection, in particular about breast cancer. But today the march of science has made it not as relevant for breast cancer. Today, most people survive breast cancer, so not such a big deal. I know a number of these women. One, a nurse, after being diagnosed said just cut these puppies off and let me get back to work. She’s doing fine.
