A Navigational Approach to Health: Actionable Guidance for Improved Quality of Life

Abstract

Lifestyle and environment interacting with our biological machine are primarily responsible for shaping our health and wellbeing. Continuous, multi-modal, and quantitative approaches to understanding and controlling these factors will allow each person to better reach their desired quality of life. A navigational paradigm can help users towards a specified health goal by using constantly captured measurements to feed estimations of how a user's health is continuously changing in order to provide actionable guidance. As various actions are taken by the user, measurements of the resulting effects loop back into the estimation and the next step of guidance. This perpetual cycle of measuring, estimating, guiding, and acting articulates a Personal Health Navigation information and actuation framework. Personal Health Navigation focuses on fulfilling a user's health goals by ensuring minimal deviation from healthy states, rather than treating disease or symptoms after derailment from proper biological function.