So, I think we need to invent something so that we can cure Crohn's disease. I have figured out what we need to invent, but I don't have the technical skills to actually build it. But you and our readers, who are very smart, probably do, or maybe you have friends who do. At the very least maybe you can tell me what kind of people might do this for pay and how much money I'd have to raise to pay them.
Here's the problem this invention will solve, for me and some of the million people who've got it: we need to know what's going on in our intestines, and to monitor them for changes daily as we try out different things that might cure us. We can't see what's going on in our intestines. The ways to see into intestines are expensive, cumbersome, and unpleasant. So the biggest clue about what's going on in our intestines is looking at our poop.
As data, poop is common and reasonably available. Here is the problem: it is socially unacceptable to be really interested in poop, or to compare notes about it. It's also transient -- you can't show it to your doctor. You have to describe it, which is hard even for a person with a pretty good grasp of language and a pretty high threshhold of embarrassment. And it's hard to remember with any accuracy what your poop looked like four days ago, and be sure about whether it has changed a lot since you stopped eating meat or started taking those pills.
But those difficulties in tracking poop are easy to overcome. I have a handy camera on my mobile phone, and I can take it with me into the bathroom, and capture the information that I am about to flush away. The photo is automatically time and date stamped. I can send it to a website where it could be uploaded into a series of photos, and I could go in and tag the dates that, say, I changed my medication. I can see trends and changes in my own intestines. I can compare what's happening with me with what's happening with other patients, without being icky or having to have embarrassing conversations.
It seems to me the technical solution to a social hangup is pretty easy to build, by mashing up some existing technology -- a sort of taggable Flickr stream, anonymized, with the ability to upload photos from a mobile phone. People like me, staring fixedly into the toilet trying to remember and understand and figure out what is going on inside us, can snap and upload and communicate a lot more information to our doctors. We can be more systematic about monitoring our symptoms. How do we build this tool?