During my years of med school, I stumbled over an extremely easy, yet highly paid part-time job.
It was easy as long as I could read comic books, watch a movie or even do nothing at all.
That was something I could definitely do, and I could earn about a month’s worth of private tutoring fees at the time, in only about two days.
That job, was taking part in clinical trials on therapeutic equivalence(TE).
Put simply, it was an experiment to see if the original medicine and the generic medicine had the same effects.
It involved gathering people who were not too concerned about side-effects, placing them in a controlled environment, administering medicine at a specific time, and drawing blood for examination.
It rewarded participants with some hefty income, and that income reflected the value of the data the human body could produce.
The human body produces tremendous amount of data, constantly.
If all that ‘bio-data’ could be collected and utilized, it would be of exorbitant value.
Moreover, such data doesn’t necessarily have to involve drawing blood at a medical institution, as I had done. Weights from a scale is a bio-data. Information of daily activity from Fitbit is also bio-data.
Nowadays, we can even send hair or urine through courier to check DNA or cell functions, which is again bio-data.
(for reference, the company HALO Korea that I have founded and am taking the CEO of, is providing such examinations)
But, are there really people out there who are willing to pay for such bio-data?
There are. In fact, there are lots.
Practitioners or healers who want to prove their remedies,
Supplement companies that want to prove and inform their products’ effectiveness,
Pharmaceutical or medical equipment companies that want to develop new products based on data,
And so on, and so forth.
Until now, interested parties could not collect ‘bio-data’ with ease.
Until now, people did not know how to provide ‘bio-data’ to those who need it.
There is supply, there is demand, but there is no market for them to freely work.
Only through medical schools or large medical institutions could such supply and demand limitedly be met, meaning centralization and a lack of transparency.
But now, a technological innovation called blockchain has emerged, and token economies are being created.
If biodata could be digitized, encrypted, stored on a blockchain platform, and be traded with tokens,
We, as suppliers of biodata, can easily produce revenue and income simply by weighing ourselves on a daily basis.
Interested parties, as consumers of biodata, such as Calamansi juice producers can easily gather people to participate in proving whether their juice is effective in weight-control;
People other than professors of medical schools, can also easily get access to data for theses;
And pharmaceutical or medical appliance companies can reduce their burden of trial-and-error.
The memory of my extremely easy, yet highly paid part-time job and token economy came across each other. They transcended the 15 year time period and catalyzed from within me an innovative idea: a blockchain project named RICCO HOLOS, a project that will bridge the consumers to the suppliers for the better of all participants.