Cheetah Project Proposal

Introduction

Diabetes is a very common, almost epidemic, disease. Your world changes when diabetes is diagnosed. From that moment on, you have to carefully monitor blood glucose levels to assure that they are within the normal range. You can then respond quickly to high or low blood sugar levels (diabetes or hypoglycemia) with appropriate intervention. Intervention is normally in the form of taking in food (carbohydrates), or injecting insuline.

There is currently no cure for diabetes. The immediate goals are to stabilize your blood sugar and eliminate the symptoms of high and low blood sugar (hyper- and hypoglycemia). The long-term goals of treatment are to prolong life, relieve symptoms, and prevent long-term complications such as heart disease and kidney failure. Besides that, costs for diabetes treatment are staggering. It is estimated that one out of every healthcare euro is spent on the provision of diabetes patients, running into serveral billion euros annually.

Your glucose level is very sensitive to insuline levels, food (carbohydrates), and health (sickness like the flue, a cold, menstruation, and even stress levels). The most scary part of the day is when you are sleeping because you cannot test or feel your glucose level. During sleep, your glucose level may drop below four mmol/l, and you may enter the state of diabetic coma and even die.

This means finely controlling your glucose level is of utmost importance. Enter Cheetah. Using Cheetah as a serious game on any standard PDA or PC, you can keep a detailed record of your glucose levels, insuline injections, activities, health status and food consumption. Cheetah collects all this information and uses sophistication self-adapting and self-learning evolutionary algorithms to fine-tune the delicate balance between all these mutually influencing factors. Cheetah works just like the advanced self-learning spam and junk filters of todays email programs.

The more information Cheetah collects, the better Cheetah gets at helping you get you insuline dose right, depending on what you're going to do or eat. And Cheetah gets even better when you and your diabetic peers share this information over the network, while maintaining absolute privacy of course. This way, Cheetah constantly gets better in getting better, leveraging the ever growing collective intelligence. At the same time, Cheetah collects and shares nutrition information (carbohydrates in aprticular) of all products, so you are always up to date. This works just like CDDB, the online database with all CD artist and track information gathered in a collective effort.

So you suffer less from 'hypers' and 'hypos' and just feel better and live longer. And your parents, partner or buddies can stop worrying about you. Also, an interesting side effect is that you require less treatment and medical care, lowering the costs for insurance companies and healthcare.

Cheetah exploits smart and sophisticated knowledge from the field of complexity theory (e.g. Bayesian principles and neural networks), evolutionary computing, and complex adaptive systems to achieve its intellegent and emergent behaviour.

Roadmap

In the first week of July, 2006, we'll have a party to look back at an exciting first half of 2006. We'll evaluate what went well, what can be better, what we have learned and what still puzzles us. And we'll party and have fun before we'll go off and enjoy a well-deserved summer vacation.

Cheetah 1.0 will be launched on Thursday July 6, 2006. Journalists, investors, colleagues, friends and family will all gather and be touched by some great new original Dutch software.

The vibrant and agile software development process leading to these two events is characterized by a continuous flow of development sprints kicked off on Monday February 6, 2006.

Deliverables

• Working, tested, integrated smooth and silky software that works as advertised:
  • Predicting the proper time and dose of the next insuline injection, based on the daily collective data of ten diabetes patients over a period of 18 months;
  • Proven resiliency against sudden or unexpected disruptions in data collections;
  • Excellent online and offline behaviour;
  • Never losing data;
  • Early warning system for potential hazarduous situations;
  • Available on current PDAs and mobile phones.
• Product website (public);
  • Foundation for user ecosystem:
  • Live graphical visualization of Wildcat running on hundreds of computers in a distributed heterogeneous wide area network;
  • Comprehensive user manual as Wiki;
  • User community process to collect feedback and requests for enhancements.
• Foundation for software ecosystem:
  • API specification (javadoc, when applicable);
  • Sample code for demos;
  • Compatibility test suite;
  • Developer community process.
• Predictable personal and team velocity;
• Life-like personas;
• Steady release rhythm;
• Eating our own dogfood (ah, well, you think of a way you can use Cheetah outside the field of diabetical care…).

Unfolding Smart Software

Technology

The basic technology requirements are:

• Java platform preferred (depending on availability and suitability on various PDAs (WinCE, PalmOS, Symbian));
• Highest possible semantic level (RDF or better) for all externally visible data, including the upper level peer-to-peer protocols
• Protocol-centric as opposed to API-centric
• Open standards only

Architecture

Prior to the start of the project, an architecture study will review the existing field of similar approaches and corresponding architectures. The study will propose the most appropriate architectural foundation. The choice of architecture will not solely be a technical choice but will also include market factors like adoption, matureness, ease of development and developer community.

Agile Software Development

AardRock is fan of agile software development like eXtreme Programming and Scrum and wholeheartedly adopts the Agile Manifesto. Most valued are:

• Test-Driven Development
• Continuous Integration
• Customer On Site
• Weekly Planning Games
• Big Visible Charts that track progress

Incremental evolving requirements

Requirements and specification will flow in during the project. There will be no detailed and complete set of specifications available at the beginning of the project. This is for the simple reason that we don't want to build "you ain't gonna need it" functionality. The project will not build the system, it will grow the system.

Innovation happens elsewhere

The deliverables of the project are intended to foster both a healthy user and developer community. Therefore, the intention is to eventually release the software solution as commercial open source software. Open source, open APIs, open data formats, open standards, and open minds help grow the developer community. And a fair commercial licensing scheme eases adoption with users while securing a solid revenue stream for evolving Wildcat into the distant future.

To maximize impact and adoption in both the user and developer community, it is of strategic importance to keep all information within the boundaries of the project team during the course of the project. As such, all artifacts and intellectual property remains the sole property of AardRock until the licensing and communication strategy is finalized and launched into the market.

Symbiosis

AardRock will pursue close collaboration with other disciplines who excell in the field of product strategy, identity, branding, interaction design, usability, marketing, sales, and customer care. Maximal cohesion and minimal coupling between the various teams of expertise will be the key approach to secure autonomous parallel activities across teams in a symbiotic way. The various disciplines will help, augment and embellish each other.

What you can expect from AardRock

Passion, energy, involvement, committment, dedication, inspiration, attention, time (≥ 1 day/week), joy. We expect this to be reciprocal.

Roles: customer on site, coach, mentor, wise fool, inspirator.

AardRock is all about PEOPLE | SOFTWARE | HAPPINESS.

Please contact Martien at AardRock dot COM for more information.