[nopinsight]

I'd say this is a good project to get funding via kickstarter.com. Have you checked it out?

It will be risky for the funders, but the risk is small compared to potential benefits for each individual. Several much less useful projects garnered higher funding than the amount you mentioned.

[dsrguru]

palish, if you have enough knowledge and are willing to invest the time given ~$1M, seriously make a kickstarter project. If this is actually both possible and doable like you say (I don't know anything about oncology), assuming it's practical enough for everyone to wear and doesn't have harmful side effects, this has got to be just about the biggest contribution to humanity that you have the power to make. (I imagine it would also be rather lucrative.) You have my word that I'd advertise the kickstarter project at the very least by word of mouth, and I'm sure many others would do the same.

[swalsh]

Anything medical has extra risk. What if the device doesn't work perfectly? When my phone doesn't work perfectly, the call drops... but when my cancer device doesn't work perfectly I become over confident, and maybe miss other signs. Its a potential liability issue.

[palish]

Using Kickstarter is a good idea, but I'm struggling with the moral implications of it. The chance that I'll succeed is inherently small, and I'd feel absolutely awful if that $1M wound up not resulting in some useful contribution.

Still, I have ideas, along with the skill necessary to test them. And if I were independently wealthy, then this is how I'd spend my time...

If I were to Kickstart this, then I'd keep a public daily journal of my efforts and short-term goals. There would be a webpage showing exactly how the money was being spent. I'd make everything as transparent as possible.

The thing is, most of my ideas will turn out to be impractical, but there's no way to know which until I test each of them. That process would require money from people who are okay with gambling on the off-chance that one of my ideas turn out to work. (Sidenote: if I happen to succeed, then I want to repay the people who funded me, at the very least.)

Here is a glimpse into the future I envision:

- A sensor in your bed scans for tumors as you sleep.

- If you have a heart attack, a sensor in your clothing immediately detects it and pushes an alert to your phone, which dispatches emergency services to your exact GPS location. (Most people keep their phone in their pocket or purse, so this seems doable.) A speaker embedded in your belt yells out step-by-step CPR instructions to the people around you.

- Your toothbrush takes your temperature and absorbs a sample of your saliva, which it analyzes for deviations from your long-term norm. It uses wifi to upload this data to your computer, along with a map of the surfaces of the teeth you brushed. The next time you use your computer, you'll see a visualization of your teeth; any surfaces which you missed when brushing are highlighted in red. (e.g. if you aren't brushing behind your molars, then those areas are highlighted.)

- As you're driving, a sensor on your rearview mirror will detect if you fall asleep at the wheel (your eyelids close for more than one second) which triggers an audible alert to wake you.

I'd love to spend my life coming up with pragmatic ways to use technology to benefit your health / monitor for emergency conditions. I'm just not sure it'd be ethical to use Kickstarter to fund possibly-crazy endeavors like this. I don't know.

[JoshTriplett]

It sounds to me like you have a pretty good idea of the technical details and challenges in such a project. You'd need to find someone with medical experience that you could work with to figure out the details, but you could find quite a bit of that expertise just by chatting with your local medical school. And at least in the short-term you won't have to worry about medical device certification, since most of the ideas you've mentioned would not directly get used for medical treatment; any actual diagnosis would still get done by a physician.

If you're serious about being willing to work on this proportionally to how much funding you get, then please by all means start a project. Pick a couple of appropriate ambitious-but-likely-possible goals, set expectations very clearly, and see if you get any takers.

[waterlesscloud]

Would this project need FDA approval? If so, the timeline would be quite long and a million bucks would come nowhere near covering it...

[JoshTriplett]

Long-term, some of these devices would need FDA approval, but many of them wouldn't.

Speaking as a non-expert (only familiar with FDA approval processes through the experiences of friends and colleagues): none of these devices would constitute a class II or III medical device, since they'd only act as an early-warning system rather than as a primary diagnostic tool or direct treatment system. Some of these devices might fall under class I (which also includes things like tongue depressors), but meeting class I wouldn't necessarily prove insanely onerous, and some care would likely allow avoiding class I as well in some cases.

[possibilistic]

This is literally the field I'm preparing to go into after I get my PhD in systems bio. The absolute best way to develop models for markers is to study metabolomics data for a huge sample size.

Take, for example, urine samples from a large number of at-risk persons and see how a specific type of cancer manifests within the group. Run the samples on GCxGC-MS and do high-order statistical comparisons or train an ML model to pick up on the markers. Given the proper treatment, these may correlate to breakdown products attributable to the development of cancerous cells.

You can model any metabolome too: blood, breath, sweat, biopsy... Urine is probably the least invasive. You should learn a thing or two about how elimination works: glucuronidation and other reactions that modify substrates to be polar enough.