Noor Siddiqui: A Remedy for Better Medical Decision Making

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By Intel2014-04-25 16:22:59 UTC

Blaring ambulance sirens may be jarring; they’d hardly be effective if they weren’t. While such a wail can make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, a siren is actually the sound of hope. It means that EMTs are responding to a call, ready to spring into action; or that someone is being treated in the midst of a personal crisis. Every second that accompanies those sirens can mean life or death; every move a paramedic makes in the back of that speeding vehicle makes a difference for patients, their families, their communities. It’s a dramatic scene that springs to life every day, in every corner of our world. Noor Siddiqui wants to make that ride to the hospital — or a nurse visit to a rural patient, or those initial moves by first responders to a natural disaster — as safe and effective as technologically possible.

Siddiqui, 19, of Clifton, Va., is the co-founder of Remedy, a company that is revolutionizing the area of human-computer interface. “It’s a tool to use with Google Glass or another wearable device, which allows one clinician to see through the eyes of another clinician,” Siddiqui says. “With it, patients can be diagnosed and treated faster. In the back of an ambulance, a paramedic’s hands are free to, say, put in a splint. A doctor back at the hospital can see what’s headed his or her way and provide live support. The doctor can send visuals through the head-mounted display, via a liquid crystal and silicon display to communicate text, video, images or GPS. All this can happen instantly, as the ambulance is in motion.” The medical expert watching from afar can recommend the right dosages of medicine or remotely facilitate the insertion of a breathing tube. “When you’re having a stroke or heart attack, minutes are muscle tissue,” says Siddiqui. “Doctors should have better tools like these, and be able to consult with their colleagues quickly and easily.” Remedy launched pilots of the technology at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania at the start of April 2014.

“The technology we’re using with this streaming video is very hardware intensive,” she insists. “It requires a lot of processing power. It was not possible to do before because of processing limitations, and Intel has been a part of making this kind of communication a reality. It’s critical that the video is transmitted in high fidelity video, because they’re being used to make medical decisions. This wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t have these Intel-powered tablets that can handle the kind of high-volume data we are sending.”

Siddiqui is a Thiel Fellow based in San Francisco, who deferred her college education to see her ideas through in the here and now. (PayPal mogul Peter Thiel invites 20 young standouts each year to forgo college — and pays them $100,000 — to bring their extraordinary ideas to life without haste). To be at the helm of the Remedy project at 19, to have conceived other altruistic social initiatives like her program that sought to engage the billion poorest world citizens and empower them to triple their incomes in three weeks, to be a part of the Thiel Fellowship, to have been asked to lead a TEDx Teen talk — these distinctions indicate a staggering intellect. But Noor isn’t in Silicon Valley to have her ego fed. “Whatever I can do to help the most people is what I want to do,” she says. “I believe you have to determine what your talents are, figure out how you can use those skills and take advantage of the opportunities at your disposal to help the most people. I was raised with the motto: To whom much has been given, much is expected.”

Everyone possesses gifts that the world will value. But it’s a rare thrill when someone as gifted as Noor Siddiqui thinks big on behalf of others, calls upon the best resources and technology to see her ideas through, and then wonders what she can do next. The next time you hear a siren careening through town, think of Noor — and the kind of hope she’s providing to the rest of us.

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