Sunday, December 6, 2015

COMMUNITY-SOURCED CLINICAL TRIALS


INTELLISITE APPLICATION:
(9-1-15)

 CROWDSOURCING CLINICAL TRIALS (CCT): Edited excerpts from
http://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Sarpatwarietal._MLR1.pdf



The rapid emergence of Crowdsourced Knowledge Development including Citizen Science now has a focus on Crowdsourcing Clinical Trials (CCT). CCT expands the potential use of crowdsourcing from observational studies by adding it to truly randomized interventional trials. Randomized experiments allow causal inference because they assign subjects to a treatment and control group, and collect data from each. However, the fact that much of public health is driven not by pharmaceuticals, but by lifestyle factors suggests that CCT’s platform for crowdsourcing also has great potential to engage the public in producing new and trustworthy knowledge in the domains of diet, exercise, nutritional supplements, and integrative medicine, which are primary drivers of health outcomes and spending. This adds critical information to the technical, clinical, legal and ethical data as to whether all material information is provided so patients may make informed decisions. 

Such CCT problems are best addressed by a diverse yet cohesive community that can bring to bear the various perspectives, knowledge, experience, insights, and sheer volume of collective effort necessary to finding reasonable solutions. The grand challenge for such collective intelligence is enabling and encouraging a simple crowd to become such a community, and to actively and coherently work on such problems, producing outcomes that are valuable both inside and outside the community.

However, for many modern problems as with CCT, the availability of people who would make up such an effective community requires a distributed and asynchronous mediation. Approaches to logic, representation, and technology found in typical information technology applications, primarily oriented on representing settled data/facts about objects and events in the “outer world”, are generally not very effective in representing the dynamic “inner world” of emergent, often inconsistent thoughts and reasoning of individuals or communities. 

Enter the AUTOGNOME as a crowd-changing radical solution.

AUTOGNOMIC COMMUNITY-SOURCED CLINICAL TRIALS 
The AutoGnomic logic of Inquiry and Inference defines and combines three forms of argument—inductive, deductive, and abductive—into an iterative adaptive system for settling on outcomes in communities of inquiry that seek “concrete reasonableness” in complex environments. The AutoGnome, founded on Peirce’s theory of signs, or semiotics, is a comprehensive theory of representation of feeling, facts, and ideas in which reasoning in both individual and communal forms can be formally described. Peirce's theory is historically exceptional in involving a genuine triadic relation between sign, object, and interpretant—the latter critical to explicitly accounting for different perspectives in members of the community. In other words, a sign is formally a sign for someother   to  someone. The AutoGnome provides a generalized, computer composable framework for relating experience (both past and anticipated) and knowledge consistent with contemporary embodied and ecological approaches to mind. Since AutoGnomics employs the same formal/semiotic framework for organizing and representing both personal and communal collective intelligence, it should be particularly effective in integrating with and enhancing both collective and individual intelligence in advancing CCT to AutoGnomic Community-sourced Clinical Trials.

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