Health policies and scientific efforts increasingly focus on how to postpone ageing and death and aim for better and longer lives. This raises a range of ethical questions such as what it means to age ‘healthily’, and where it is meaningful to draw the line....
They walk around the inner city of Copenhagen. Around their neck they wear a small front-facing camera catching a picture every 5th second from their chest of their urban experiences - be it a park or a concrete wall, a traffic jam or children playing. They wear...
As part of the fight against COVID-19, many countries chose to develop and use a contact tracing app based on a decentralized structure controlled by Apple and Google. Had we chosen to keep the data centralized, we could have used the data for research to foster new...
Update: Get the research paper in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society as of January 2021 Interview. In Denmark, when you turn 65, you’re supposed to get a visit from the municipality if you need it. The purpose is to assess your living situation and find out if...
Imagine a digital platform, where you could access data sets from European scientific researchers and reuse them. Today, all these data sets are scattered around universities’ servers or even on personal servers in offices - and they are growing immensely in numbers. But with a...
A one-stop-portal is being built to serve scientists with an overview of and easier access to the Danes’ health data. It is led by Danish Regions, an umbrella organisation of the five Danish regions in charge of all hospitals. Here’s an interview with Executive Vice...
(update below) As personal data has become more and more valuable, the smoothness of data practises in the welfare state is fading away. Competition, conflicting interests or just bureaucracy can hinder research to keep the welfare state afloat, according to experts. Danish registers were established to...
Years of lobbying in the EU has paid off for scientists in Denmark, who for years have the privilege of getting access to rich personal data registers without having to ask for consent. Interview with an epidemiology professor, who thinks that researchers should have more...
Interview with Jørgen Elmeskov, Director General of Statistics Denmark. When the medical authorities wanted access to Danes' location data from telcos in order to fight Covid-19, they enlisted the support of Statistics Denmark for hosting the data. The reason? Even though no data on individuals were...
In New Jersey, USA, one family is unusually hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. The mother of 11 and grandmother of 27 is dead. So are 2 of her 11 children. And 4 other of her children have contacted corona virus and are hospitalized, three of...