co-founder
Open mHealth
As a pioneer in embedded networked sensing (ENS) technology and teacher of health tech at Cornell, Deborah Estrin figured that if learnings from the Internet could be applied to mobile health, the impact on healthcare could be dramatic.
In 2011, she cofounded the nonprofit Open mHealth, described as “the first and only open standard for mobile health data,” with the objective of making data more accessible and usable through open-source tools. The idea is that there isn’t going to be one app or device to “tell” a person’s health story, so there needs to be a way to access and harmonize data from disparate sources, without a compromising fee.
With that ambitious goal in mind, Estrin set about creating a global community of developers, product managers, health IT decisionmakers and clinical researchers to build an open framework for using digital health data. The code is open-sourced through the Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be adapted and evolved by members to fit their specific needs.
