Data City, Data Nation - " Health & Wellbeing Challenge"

Andrew Cowen - Chairman

Data City Data Nation – ‘Health and Wellbeing Challenge’


Title: Big Data - Hidden Treasures

Big Data is comparable to the arts in that it offers a plethora of interpretations, but most importantly, both have hidden meanings and offer different ways of interacting with our world and understanding it.  Delving deep into Big Data is an odyssey of discovery, like a Renaissance explorer seeking to find out about the world. We peer into a forest of multi-layered information streams. Pursuing just one can take us on an exciting journey, but following multi layers of data streams opens up an entire new, exciting, multidimensional landscape of representations that goes way beyond our current grasp of things. 

The Challenge: 

Digital Catapult’s Data City Data Nations initiative and research challenge is one such odyssey. Big Data affords a myriad of possibilities and opportunities, limited solely by our own imaginations. It will be a game changer in our understanding of things. I write as a commercial and creative contributor to the Data City Data Nations programme, with my company providing a sample set of 100 anonymised users’ real-time health and wellbeing data, captured over eighteen months and linked to demographics and medical conditions. Combined with other data sets that Digital Catapult has brought together, these combined data sets are likely to reveal astounding insights, e.g. Big Data analysis of those with Alzheimers dementia helped refocus research away from one area of the brain and re-focus efforts instead on the patient’s immune system. Our Big Data challenge is to seek correlations between our real-time data in relation to medical conditions and to see if there are any opportunities to develop preventative and reactive health algorithms.

Wellbeing APP 

The opportunity to be part of Digital Catapult’s Data City Data Nations - ‘Health & Wellbeing’ and later ‘Population’ exploration. Digital Catapult’s initiative puts Dig Data in the spotlight. This opportunity offers my company huge benefits, and by extension our partners and the commercial and academic and research communities, as well as society as a whole.  Big Data is a currency that cannot be ignored. Failure to take on board this information revolution and incorporate Big Data into our respective ecosystems is a risk.

Circadian Rhythm 

 The data in itself is nothing new, but organisations tend to be complacent about the value of the data wealth they hold. Upscaling this and working in collaboration with others in the UK as well as in the international community, is a game changer, heralding a new era.
Using our imaginations and entrepreneurialism, the analytical tools currently at our disposal, and Digital Catapults effrots to reach out to the international community and provide a free ‘sandpit’ of data sets to play with, we truly enter a brave new world.


 As an entrepreneur with a love of the arts, I am impatient to see what comes out of this fast-evolving and shape-shifting picture. Technology today helps us answer many questions, but Dig Data can throw up more and provide insights, revealing what we haven’t realised or questioned before, because like all journeys you never know or see what’s just around the corner.

Andrew Cowen, Founder and CEO of The Future Care (UK) Ltd