Pivot firmly in place

2018 is about to pass in 2019 is about to begin. It’s been a busy year, to say the least.  The pivot away from community design projects to more clearly focus on healthcare have largely been completed. We are now quite well-connected with the “wellness” community and businesses; we’ve completed the proof of concept development for several healthcare assessment applications; and are now well-positioned to leverage off of those key development efforts of 2018.

Alliance with WTF! – re-launch with  Pocket Pal

One of the more exciting developments for this coming year is going to be the realization and launch of a social venture that comes from the work that Whitney Vosburgh and I did last year. We had produced the manuscript size book entitled WorkTheFuture, Today!  however, as we began to enter the market we found that the sheer scope and complexity of material was often hard for people to comprehend in a way that they could take action on it.

This data point coupled with the knowledge that we were gaining about “cognitive automation” led us to produce another volume, but in the vastly different format that is coherent with developments in automating human-computer interaction and deep learning. But more about that in a future blog.

Beginning in January 2019,  Whitney and I will be relaunching that original book along with its companion written in what we call “pocket pal” format to make things more accessible to people. This is also a first step in making our learnings transparent and hopefully someday in a verbal interaction format.

Healthcare in 2019

As I mentioned we were able to develop a suite of applications in the area of wellness assessment. These assessments have been successful, beta tested that are now ready for systems integration and scaling. Much to our chagrin, we lost our technical support staff to the larger marketplace. Simply put, Ray (my youngest) was hired away by a Fortune 100 business to continue his career in developing and bringing to market these new artificial intelligence technologies. So, further technical efforts have been placed on hiatus.

We have several promising conversations that have just started in the past 30 days that may become pathways to go to market with our existing assessments. More news to follow.

Development in 2019 will key off what we found to be THE critical element in our idea of a wellness dashboard to help people manage their own well-being. In a nutshell, it turns out that being able to visualize, measure and design your own social network for support purposes is perhaps the most innovative part of the work we did in 2018.

So, we are going to pursue that subsystem into this coming year and test a number of curated guides to manage in your social network. Specifically, we are going to focus on two narrow market segments.

• Veterans suffering from PTSD and
• Midcareer professionals who are being displaced from their careers.

What both of these segments have in common is severe social stress and a lack of adequate treatment or support systems in today’s US-based healthcare industry.

More time for friends and family

In closing, as most of you know, the past couple of years have been tremendously challenging in terms of Ellen and my personal well-being situations. Suffice to say, we got the message. As we enter our seventh decade on this planet we will the doing our own “reset”. To borrow a phrase we’re going to be spending more time with friends and family and crossing a whole number of things off of our respective “bucket list”.

So the direction is set, the intent is fixed the now we are off into the next chapter. We also note, that we expect this coming year or so to be fraught with a lot of change, pain, and general distress. The good news is that this is to be expected as a precursor to any social change that advances the evolution of our species. And quite clearly we are on the cusp of that change. Our job now is to rest, breathe in and be ready to contribute what we can to that change as the door opens.

Namaste

A little jazz to start the year. Take us out Melody