{"id":24243,"date":"2021-05-10T05:37:16","date_gmt":"2021-05-10T05:37:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rbsitsoftwaresolution.com\/blog\/the-human-focused-startups-of-the-hellfire.html"},"modified":"2021-05-10T05:37:16","modified_gmt":"2021-05-10T05:37:16","slug":"the-human-focused-startups-of-the-hellfire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/the-human-focused-startups-of-the-hellfire.html","title":{"rendered":"The human-focused startups of the hellfire"},"content":{"rendered":"

Disasters may not<\/span> always be man-made, but they are always responded to by humans. There\u2019s a whole panoply of skills and professions required today to respond to even the tiniest emergency, and that doesn\u2019t even include the needs during pre-disaster planning and post-disaster recovery. It\u2019s not a very remunerative industry for most and the mental health effects from stress can linger for decades, but the mission at the core of this work \u2014 to help people in the time of their greatest need \u2014 is what continues to attract many to partake in this never-ending battle anyway.<\/p>\n

In the last three parts of this series on the future of technology and disaster response, I\u2019ve focused on, well, technology, and specifically the sales cycle for new products<\/a>, the sudden data deluge now that Internet of Things (IoT) is in full force<\/a>, and the connectivity that allows that data to radiate all around<\/a>. What we haven\u2019t looked at enough so far is the human element: the people who actually respond to disasters as well as what challenges they face and how technology can help them.<\/p>\n

So in this fourth and final part of the series, we\u2019ll look at four areas where humans and technology intersect within disaster response and what future opportunities lie in this market: training and development, mental health, crowdsourced responses to disasters, and our doomsday future of hyper-complex emergencies.<\/p>\n

Training in a hellfire<\/h2>\n

Most fields have linear approaches to training. To become a software engineer, students learn some computer science theory, add in some programming practice, and voil\u00e0 (note: your mileage may vary). To become a medical doctor, aspiring physicians take an undergraduate curriculum teeming with biology and chemistry, head to medical school for two deadened years of core anatomy and other classes and then switch into clinical rotations, a residency, and maybe fellowships.<\/p>\n

But how do you train someone to respond to emergencies?<\/p>\n

From 911 call takers to EMTs and paramedics to emergency planning officials and the on-the-ground responders who are operating in the center of the storm as it were, there are large permutations in the skills required to do these jobs well. What\u2019s necessary aren\u2019t just specific hard skills like using call dispatch software or knowing how to upload video from a disaster site, but also critically-important softer skills as well: precisely communicating, having sangfroid, increasing agility, and balancing improvisation with consistency. The chaos element also can\u2019t be overstated: every disaster is different, and these skills must be viscerally recombined and exercised under extreme pressure with frequently sparse information.<\/p>\n

A whole range of what might be dubbed \u201cedtech\u201d products could serve these needs, and not just exclusively for emergency management.<\/p>\n

Communications, for instance, isn\u2019t just about team communications, but also communicating with many different constituencies. Aaron Clark-Ginsberg, a social scientist at RAND Corporation<\/a>, said that \u201ca lot of these skills are social skills \u2014 being able to work with different groups of people in culturally and socially appropriate ways.\u201d He notes that the field of emergency management has heightened attention to these issues in recent years, and \u201cthe skillset we need is to work with those community structures\u201d that already exist where a disaster strikes.<\/p>\n

As we\u2019ve seen in the tech industry the last few years, cross-cultural communication skills remain scarce. One can always learn this just through repeated experiences, but could we train people to develop empathy and understanding through software? Can we develop better and richer scenarios to train emergency responders \u2014 and all of us, really \u2014 on how to communicate effectively in widely diverging conditions? That\u2019s a huge opportunity for a startup to tackle.<\/p>\n

Emergency management is now a well-developed career path. \u201cThe history of the field is very fascinating, [it\u2019s] been increasingly professionalized, with all these certifications,\u201d Clark-Ginsberg said. That professionalization \u201cstandardizes emergency response so that you know what you are getting since they have all these certs, and you know what they know and what they don\u2019t.\u201d Certifications can indicate singular competence, but perhaps not holistic assessment, and it\u2019s a market that offers opportunities for new startups to create better assessments.<\/p>\n

Like many of us, responders get used to doing the same thing over and over again, and that can make training for new skills even more challenging. Michael Martin of emergency data management platform RapidSOS<\/a> describes how 911 call takers get used to muscle memory, \u201cso switching to a new system is very high-risk.\u201d No matter how bad existing software interfaces are, changing them will very likely slow every single response down while increasing the risk of errors. That\u2019s why the company offers \u201c25,000 hours a year for training, support, integration.\u201d There remains a huge and relatively fragmented market for training staff as well as transitioning them from one software stack to another.<\/p>\n

Outside these somewhat narrow niches, there is a need for a massive renaissance in training in this whole area. My colleague Natasha Mascarenhas recently wrote an EC-1 on Duolingo<\/a>, an app designed to gamify and entrance students interested in learning second languages. It\u2019s a compelling product, and there is no comparative training system for engaging the full gamut of first responders.<\/p>\n

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The Duolingo EC-1<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Art delaCruz, COO and president of Team Rubicon<\/a>, a non-profit which assembles teams of volunteer military veterans to respond to natural disasters, said that it\u2019s an issue his organization is spending more time thinking about. \u201cPart of resilience is education, and the ability to access information, and that is a gap that we continue to close on,\u201d he said. \u201cHow do you present information that\u2019s more simple than [a learning management system]?\u201d He described the need for \u201cknowledge bombs like flash cards\u201d to regularly provide responders with new knowledge while testing existing ideas.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a need to scale up best practices rapidly across the world. Tom Cotter, director of emergency response and preparedness at Project Hope<\/a>, a non-profit which empowers local healthcare workers in disaster-stricken and impoverished areas, said that in the context of COVID-19, \u201ca lot of what was going to be needed [early on] was training \u2014 there were huge information gaps at the clinical level, how to communicate it at a community level.\u201d The organization developed a curriculum with Brown University\u2019s Watson Institute<\/a> in the form of interactive PowerPoints that were ultimately used to train 100,000 healthcare workers on the new virus, according to Cotter.<\/p>\n

When I look at the spectrum of edtech products existing today, one of the key peculiarities is just how narrow each seems to focus. There are apps for language learning and for learning math and developing literacy. There are flash card apps like Anki<\/a> that are popular among medical students, and more interactive approaches like Labster for science experiments<\/a> and Sketchy for learning anatomy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yet, for all the talk of boot camps in Silicon Valley, there is no edtech company that tries to completely transform a student in the way that a bona fide boot camp does. No startup wants to holistically develop their students, adding in hard skills while also advancing the ability to handle stress, the improvisation needed to confront rapidly-changing environments, and the skills needed to communicate with empathy.<\/p>\n

Maybe that can\u2019t be done with software. Maybe. Or perhaps, no founder has just had the ambition so far to go for broke \u2014 to really revolutionize how we think about training the next generation of emergency management professionals and everyone else in private industry who needs to handle stress or think on their feet just as much as frontline workers.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the direction where Bryce Stirton, president and co-founder of public-safety company Responder Corp<\/a>, has been thinking about. \u201cAnother area I am personally a fan of is the training space around VR,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s very difficult to synthesize these stressful environments,\u201d in areas like firefighting, but new technologies have \u201cthe ability to pump the heart that you need to experience in training.\u201d He concludes that \u201cthe VR world, it can have a large impact.\u201d<\/p>\n

Healing after disaster<\/h2>\n

When it comes to trauma, few fields face quite the challenge as emergency response. It\u2019s work that almost by definition forces its personnel to confront some of the most harrowing scenes imaginable. Death and destruction are given, but what\u2019s not always accounted for is the lack of agency in some of these contexts for first responders \u2014 the family that can\u2019t be saved in time so a 911 call taker has to offer final solace, or the paramedics who don\u2019t have the right equipment even as they are showing up on site.<\/p>\n

Post-traumatic stress is perhaps the most well-known and common mental health condition facing first responders, although it is hardly the only one. How to ameliorate and potentially even cure these conditions represents a burgeoning area of investment and growth for a number of startups and investors.<\/p>\n

Risk Return<\/a>, for instance, is a venture firm heavily focused on companies working on mental health as well as human performance more generally. In my profile of the firm a few weeks ago<\/a>, managing director Jeff Eggers said that \u201cWe love that type of technology since it has that dual purpose: going to serve the first responder on the ground, but the community is also going to benefit.\u201d<\/p>\n

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With a third of its capital deployed, Risk Return is transforming how we think about emergency response<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Two examples of companies from its portfolio are useful here to explore as examples of different pathways in this category. The first is Alto Neuroscience<\/a>, which is a stealthy startup founded by Amit Etkin<\/a>, a multidisciplinary neuroscientist and psychiatrist at Stanford, to create new clinical treatments to post-traumatic stress and other conditions based on brainwave data. Given its therapeutic focus, it\u2019s probably years before testing and regulatory approvals come through, but this sort of research is on the cutting-edge of innovation here.<\/p>\n

The second company is NeuroFlow<\/a>, which is a software startup using apps to guide patients to better mental health outcomes. Through persistent polling, testing, and collaboration with practitioners, the company\u2019s tools allow for more active monitoring of mental health \u2014 looking for emerging symptoms or relapses in even the most complicated cases. NeuroFlow is more on the clinical side, but there are obviously a wealth of wellness startups that have percolated in recent years as well like Headspace<\/a> and Calm<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Outside of therapeutics and software though, there are entirely new frontiers around mental health in areas like psychedelics. That was one of the trends I called out as a top five area for investment in the 2020s<\/a> earlier this year, and I stand by that. We\u2019ve also covered<\/a> a startup called Osmind<\/a> which is a clinical platform for managing patients with a psychedelic focus.<\/p>\n

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5 startup theses that will transform the 2020s<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Risk Return itself hasn\u2019t made an investment in psychedelics yet, but Bob Kerrey, the firm\u2019s board chairman and the former co-chair of the 9\/11 Commission as well as former governor and senator of Nebraska, said that \u201cit\u2019s difficult to do this if you are the government, but easier to do this in the private sector.\u201d<\/p>\n

Similar to edtech, mental health startups might get their start in the first responder community, but they are hardly limited to this population. Post-traumatic stress and other mental health conditions affect wide swaths of the world\u2019s population, and solutions that work in one community can often translate more broadly to others. It\u2019s a massive, massive market, and one that could potentially transform the lives of millions of people for the better.<\/p>\n

Before moving on, there\u2019s one other area of interest here, and that is creating impactful communities for healing. First responders and military veterans experience a mission and camaraderie in their service that they often lack once they are in new jobs or on convalescence. DelaCruz of Team Rubicon says that one of the goals of bringing veterans to help in disaster regions is that the veterans themselves \u201creconnect with identity and community \u2014 we have these incredible assets in these men and women who have served.\u201d It\u2019s not enough to just find a single treatment per patient \u2014 we oftentimes need to zoom out to the wider population to see how mental health ripples out.<\/p>\n

Helping people find purpose may not be the easiest challenge to solve as a startup, but it\u2019s certainly a major challenge for many, and an area fermenting with new approaches now that the the social networking wave has reached its nadir.<\/p>\n

Crowdsourcing disaster response<\/h2>\n

Decentralization has been all the rage in tech in recent years \u2014 just mention the word blockchain in a TechCrunch article to get at least 50 PR emails about the latest NFT for a toilet stain. While there is obviously a lot of noise, one area where substance may pan out well is in disaster response.<\/p>\n

If the COVID-19 pandemic showed anything, it was the power of the internet to aggregate as well as verify data, build dashboards, and deliver highly-effective visualizations of complex information for professionals and laypeople alike. Those products were developed by people all around the world often from the comfort of their own homes, and they demonstrate how crowds can quickly draft serious labor to help respond to crises as they crop up.<\/p>\n

Jonathan Sury, project director at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, said that \u201cCOVID has really blown so much of what we think about out of the water.\u201d With so many ways to collaborate online right now, \u201cthat\u2019s what I would say is very exciting \u2026 and also practical and empowering.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clark-Ginsberg of RAND calls it the \u201cnext frontier of disaster management.\u201d He argues that \u201cif you can use technology to broaden the number of people who can participate in disaster management and respond to disasters,\u201d then we might be reaching an entirely new paradigm for what effective disaster response will look like. \u201cFormal structures [for professional frontline workers] have strengthened and that has saved lives and resources, but our ability to engage with everyday responders is still something to work on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of the tools that underpin these crowdsourced efforts don\u2019t even focus on disasters. Sury pointed to Tableau<\/a> and data visualization platform Flourish<\/a> as examples of the kinds of tools that remote, lay first responders are using. There are now quite robust tools for tabular data, but we\u2019re still relatively early in the development of tools for handling mapping data \u2014 obviously critical in the crisis context. Unfolded.ai<\/a>, which I profiled earlier this year<\/a>, is working on building scalable geospatial analytics in the browser. A lot more can be done here.<\/p>\n

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Ex-Uber team raises $6M seed for geospatial analytics platform Unfolded.ai<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Oftentimes there are ways to coordinate the coordinators. Develop for Good<\/a>, which I looked at late last year<\/a>, is a non-profit designed to connect enterprising computer science students to software and data projects at non-profits and agencies that needed help during the pandemic. Sometimes these coordinators are non-profit orgs, and sometimes, just very active Twitter accounts. There\u2019s a lot more experimentation possible on how to coordinate efforts in a decentralized way while still engaging with professional first responders and the public sector.<\/p>\n

Speaking of decentralization, it\u2019s even possible that blockchain could play a role in disaster and crisis response. Many of these opportunities rest on using blockchain for evidence collection or for identity. For example, earlier this week Leigh Cuen took a careful look at an at-home sexual assault evidence collection kit<\/a> from Leda Health<\/a> that uses the blockchain to establish a clear time for when a sample was collected.<\/p>\n

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Radical Ethereum entrepreneurs are redefining what \u2018rape kit\u2019 means<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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There is a lot more potential to harness the power of crowdsourcing and decentralization, and many of these projects have applications far outside disaster management itself. These tools not only solve real problems \u2014 they provide real community to people who may not be related to the disaster itself, but are enthusiastic to do their part to help others.<\/p>\n

The black swans of black swans<\/h2>\n

In terms of startups, the three markets I identified \u2014 better training, better mental health, and better crowdsourcing collaboration tools, particularly around data \u2014 collectively represent a very compelling set of markets that will not only be valuable for founders, but can rapidly improve lives.<\/p>\n

In his book Normal Accidents<\/a>, Charles Perrow talks about how an increasing level of complexity and coupledness in our modern technical systems all but guarantee disasters to occur. Add in a warming world as well as the intensity, frequency, and just plain unusualness of disasters arriving each year, and we are increasingly seeing entirely novel forms of emergencies we have never responded to before. Take most recently the ultra-frigid conditions in Texas that sapped power from its grid, leading to statewide blackouts for hours and days in some parts of the state.<\/p>\n

Clark-Ginsberg said, \u201cWe are seeing these risks emerge that aren\u2019t just typical wildfires \u2014 where we have a response structure that we can easily setup and manage the hazard, [we\u2019re] very good at managing these typical disasters. There are more of these atypical disasters cropping up, and we have a very hard time setting up structures for this \u2014 the pandemic is a great example of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

He describes these challenges as \u201ctrans-boundary risk management,\u201d disasters that cross bureaucratic lines, professions, societies, and means of action. \u201cIt takes a certain agility and the ability to move quickly and the ability to work in ways outside typical bureaucratic structures, and that is just challenging full stop,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Even as we begin to have better point solutions to the individual problems that disasters and their responses require, we can\u2019t be remiss in neglecting the more systematic challenges that these emergencies are bringing to the fore. We have to start thinking about bringing humans together faster and in more novel ways to be the most effective, while coupling them flexibly and with agility to the best tools that meet their needs in the moment. That\u2019s probably not literally \u201ca startup,\u201d but more a way of thinking about what it means to construct a disaster response fresh given the information available.<\/p>\n

Amanda Levin, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council<\/a>, said that \u201ceven if we mitigate, there are huge pressures and huge impacts today from a warming world \u2026 even if we stop emissions today, [they] will still persist.\u201d As one of my interviewees in government service who asked to go unnamed noted about disaster response, \u201cYou always are coming up short somewhere.\u201d The problems are only getting harder, and we humans need much better tools to match the man-made trials we created for ourselves. That\u2019s the challenge \u2014 and opportunity \u2014 for a tough century ahead.<\/p>\n

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Silicon Valley\u2019s myths and realities of existential risk<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/2TEGNH9pk0U\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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