Long Title: Digital Health, Medical XR, and Hacking Humans – New Solutions for CyberHealth

Speaker: Divya Chander

Affiliation: Lucidify, CEO

Other Affiliations:
Chair in Neuroscience & Faculty in Medicine, Singularity Group
Senior Nonresident Fellow, Atlantic Council GeoTech Center
Medical Advisor, Extended Reality Safety Initiative
Staff Anesthesiologist, Alameda Health System & San Mateo Medical Center

Abstract:
Digital health and associated spheres like medical extended reality, wearables and implantables, provide new opportunities for extended healthcare access and medical training to a wide swath of the population. Further, pandemic resilience requires the creation of integrated warning systems that can collect and integrate sensitive data at the edge.  In many cases, the data collected passively and actively by devices at the edge include biometrics and biometrically-inferred data – the most sensitive data we own.  User identification, authentication, data collection, storage, and connectivity on both decentralized and aggregated networks create new threat landscapes that are exacerbated by key edge vulnerabilities. In this talk, we explore some of this new risk landscape, as well as new network solutions and frameworks that provide means for user-centric control, security, and privacy, which will revolutionize both cyberhealth networks as well as edge-based user interactions with Web 3.0 and the metaverse.

In this talk, you will learn:
1. how to think about the dizzying new array of data collection types and data producers that can be used for intelligent healthcare;
2. how health and wellness shifted into the commercial market create new opportunities for monitoring, wellness, and risk;
3. how interactions between biometrics and commercial endeavors, including Web 3.0 and the burgeoning metaverse, create new opportunities and biometric risk;
4. how humans can be literally hacked and subject to ransomware, much as machines and software;
5. how future internet architectures and exponential thinking might enhance cybersecurity and user-centric control at the network’s edge.

Biography:
Dr. Divya Chander is a physician, neuroscientist, and futurist who trained at Harvard, UCSF, UCSD, and the Salk Institute. She is currently the Chair of Neuroscience and Faculty in Medicine at Singularity University. She is also a Visiting Scholar in the Stanford Department of Medicine, Biomedical Informatics, and was a member of the Stanford Anesthesiology Faculty for 8 years. Her postdoctoral training Stanford (Deisseroth/de Lecea Labs) allowed her to use light-activated ion channels inserted in DNA (optogenetics) to study sleep and consciousness switches in brains. In the operating room, she applies EEG technology to understand what human brains and the underlying networks look like when they lose and regain consciousness. She also has a precision medicine initiative focused on understanding genetic variability in responses to anesthetic drugs and brain oscillations. Her goal is to understand neural mechanisms of consciousness, as well as the evolution of human consciousness secondary to human augmentation.

She is working on devices that read and write the brain (brain mapping, neuromodulation) and link to brain machine interfaces for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.

Her work also crosses into studies of human longevity. There is no extended human lifespan without the preservation of the brain and mind. How do technologies like brain machine interfaces, human augmentation and cryonics affect the future of human consciousness?

Divya also works in the field of space life sciences. A finalist for astronaut selection and an alumnus of the International Space University, she has performed remote simulations of trauma rescues, anesthesia and surgery in Mars analogue settings with physicians in the US, France, and the Concordia base in Antarctica. She has also been involved with a consortium that elaborated a road-map for studying the effect of microgravity and radiation on the nervous system, cardiovascular system, cognition and sleep.