Electrical health signals from our bodies: help us improve how we explain and use these data

Our bodies work through electricity. When we are in hospital, this electricity is often recorded. You may be familiar with the ‘ECG’ - electricity from the heart. We can also record electricity from other body parts, like the brain. This kind of bioelectrical health data helps us to understand how disease happens, and how we could prevent this.

We want the public to be part of this research journey; in this workshop within London Data Week, we invite your input! Help us to shape the way that we talk about bioelectrical health data, and give us your thoughts. After the event, we will post a summary on Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/). Anybody who attends this event and is happy to share their name can be listed as a co-author. The summary will then be linked to from King’s College London webpages, and we will invite more people to contribute to and update the document. By doing this, we will crowdsource a ‘citizen science’ approach to bioelectrical health data, giving everybody the opportunity to contribute.

Agenda for the event:

• Icebreaker.
• Brief introduction to bioelectrical data, including how its collection looks in real time.
• Opportunity for attendees to ask questions.
• Help us to better explain bioelectrical data! How does it look? How is it stored? How can we best visualise it? Are there good metaphors for it (like ‘brainwave’)? Vote on your preference, and suggest better ways!
• Tell us how you feel about your own bioelectrical data! For example, is our brain electricity data from a week ago, or a year ago, still ‘us’? Is it part of our history, or a fingerprint of our personality? Using polls and discussion, we will open up this conversation.
• Agreeing next steps.

This event will be delivered by healthcare scientist Kim Whitehead (kimberley.whitehead@kcl.ac.uk) and digital health specialist Lili Golmohammadi from King’s College London’s Digital Health and Applied Technology Assessment (DHATA) and Methodologies research divisions, in the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care. Kim has a long-standing interest in sharing bioelectrical health data research with the public, and the images advertising this event are from work she commissioned from artist Andrew Carnie. The wiggly lines represent electrical brainwaves.

This event is suitable for a general audience (adults or 14 years+). We particularly invite those from minority backgrounds to attend, who are often under-represented in data science conversations. We will thank participants who attend the full session for their contribution with £30 of Love2Shop vouchers.