Health Tech Is Obsessed with Big Data. What About Personal Data?

Most digital health and AI initiatives focus on “big data”, massive institutional datasets aggregated across populations. That’s valuable for research, but it leaves out a different kind of dataset; the one each of us generates about ourselves every day. • Wearables track steps, sleep, heart rate • EHRs store labs and diagnoses • Journals, calendars, and environmental context record lived experience

The problem is that these streams are siloed and inaccessible. Individuals rarely get tools to unify them into something meaningful. What if, instead of centralizing everything at the institutional level, we built frameworks that allowed individuals to own, structure, and analyze their own data?

This raises a lot of questions worth exploring: • What standards (FHIR, ontologies, etc.) could support interoperability at the individual level? • How can open-source projects design for privacy by default while remaining extensible? • Could “personal data ontologies” become as foundational as institutional EMRs? • Where are the risks in decentralizing analysis to the individual?

We’ve been researching this area and see a growing gap. Health tech is advancing in scale, but not in personal sovereignty.

Curious what this community thinks: Is the future of health tech going to remain centralized around big datasets, or is there room for personal-scale, open frameworks that empower individuals directly?