Health Observer Systems: A Comparative Review

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I looked for every health data system that shares features with my Medical Snapshot proposal, programmes that test people over time, store what they find, and don’t necessarily tell anyone what they found. I found 26, spanning nine decades from the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932) to Our Future Health (2022). This page describes what was compared, how the comparison was done, and what the results look like.

What I Measured and Why

This analysis is compares existing systems against a hypothetical system. There are many reasons why this is not solid science, but it is an interesting preliminary exploration of solutions. There is a olot of sope for future work.

Medical Snapshot

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000

This is about an Observer-only Medical system, which can be immensely useful to society and governments, hepling understand health and reducing suffering. There are many such systems (I know of at least 26) but they all have a common principle:

individuals have their health monitored and are not told the results.

So what’s in it for the individual who gives up the right to their own health data? I started thinking about this while working in health systems (the Internet Archive found a version from 2010). Over the years since then I have been variously employed in privacy, data sharing/donation, safety in health data movements, causality and risk assessment and my original background of cybersecurity — all of which are combined in observer health systems. When I realised that I have been doing this all along, I made a comparison of 26 existing systems spanning 90 years, complete with a scoring system and graphical analysis.

Medicine on Dan Shearer

Health Observer Systems: A Comparative Review

What I Measured and Why

Medical Snapshot