Why 1 Gbs Matters for Telehealth

Some of the existing telehealth initiatives in Columbia still require patients to travel a short distance to a telehealth facility that has an ultra-high speed (2Gb) connection. With a 1Gb connection to the home, these services would be able to expand to provide care to a greater number of under-served patients.

Services that already deliver care to the home over existing broadband connections could be greatly strengthened and increased by higher quality video. Lower latency, higher resolutions for better visual diagnoses, and the ability for more and better interactions through a larger video display are just a few of the benefits that would be enabled through a 1Gb connection.

Existing Telehealth Initiatives in Columbia

TigerPlace
TigerPlace is an assisted living facility designed by the School of Nursing and Americare Corp. to provide independence and quality of life for elders while offering necessary assistance, monitoring, and care. Some of the strategies the team has devised include installing passive sensors in residential units at TigerPlace to determine whether the residents are engaging in normal activities or whether subtle signs of decompensation call for early intervention. Collecting massive amounts of sensor and video-based data from multiple units requires high bandwidth connections.

HomePsych by Iconic Health
HomePsych connects mental health care professionals to communities and clients. From the client portal, users are one click away from starting HomePsych's TelePsych system, which enables simple, zero-configuration, face-to-face meetings with video and text chat from anywhere.

Missouri Telehealth Network
Missouri Telehealth Network began in 1994 as one of the nation's first public-private partnerships in telehealth. The Missouri Telehealth Network exists to enhance access to care to underserved areas of Missouri, to provide educational opportunities for health care providers, to further homeland security efforts related to disaster preparedness, to be available in the event of a disaster and to provide research opportunities to clinicians wanting to study via telehealth.

Why 1 Gbs Matters for Education

Fiber to the home would offer a wealth of opportunities to improve traditional and peer-to-peer education. Each initiative below could benefit in a different way.

Existing Education Initiatives in Columbia

iSocial
iSocial is a three dimensional virtual learning environment, developed using Sun Microsystem's Project Wonderland toolkit for creating virtual worlds, for teaching social competence to youth who have been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The goal of iSocial is to provide learners with competencies that make social participation possible in both virtual and natural settings. To this end, iSocial enables social interaction and provides support for the development of social competence in a safe, completely controlled environment.

Because the proximity of families to the location of qualified trainers and the times available for physical meetings restrict access to social competence curricula, such training and instruction can be made accessible to only a small number of the youth who could benefit from it.

Fast and inexpensive broadband would allow more ASD youth in the area to access iSocial.

Star Light Reading Program
During the Star Light Reading Program, student athletes read a book to children in a classroom using videoconferencing technology. They discuss the book with the children and the children have the opportunity to ask the athletes questions.

Readings take place approximately once per week each semester. Representatives from the College of Education work with Athletic Department personnel to set up athletes to read each week, choose the book that will be read to the class, meet with the athlete to go over the book before it is read, and work with the teachers in the schools to schedule the videoconferences.

Fiber to the home would allow this and other literacy initiatives to be more frequent and more interactive with a robust peer-to-peer component.

Saturday Morning Science
Hosted by the Bond Life Sciences Center, Saturday Morning Science allows top researchers to share their discoveries with the public in meaningful and interesting ways. Recent topics have included "How Game Theory Explains Stupid Behavior" and "Do We Really Need Sleep?"

Ubiquitous high-speed connections would kick this program into overdrive with video-enhanced connections into the home, the ability to illustrate concepts with high-end data visualizations and an opportunity to experiment with multi-player, serious gaming as a platform for science education around key topics such as energy conservation, health care, genetics, sustainable agriculture and the like. Again, peer-to-peer networking would greatly enhance sharing of knowledge.

Lifelong and Service Learning
Through its connections with the University of Missouri, Columbia acts on a strong commitment to lifelong learning and access to education for underserved residents.

The elderly population in mid-Missouri is increasingly active and interested in new learning opportunities that carry over into retirement. University of Missouri Extension's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute responds to these interests with inexpensive, weekly classes. While the institute takes some advantage of a statewide telecommunications network, most of the teaching and learning takes place at a few physical locations in and around Columbia.

Fiber to the home would significantly expand the audience for lifelong learning classes and enrich the experience through real-time, rich-media interactions.

MU also runs the second largest service-learning program in the country. Each year, more than 3,000 MU students serve over 120,000 hours with Columbia community agencies while earning academic credit. Service-Learning students are involved in projects such as mentoring and tutoring young people, visiting and assisting the elderly, working at animal shelters, designing websites for community agencies, and many other activities that are invaluable to the citizens of Columbia.

All of these initiatives would benefit from fiber to the home. The MU Office of Service-Learning could also help coordinate in-home and video training to support elderly and economically disadvantaged residents wanting to take advantage of the many services offered through the Google Fiber to Communities initiative.

MBS Textbook Exchange, Inc.
MBS is the largest textbook wholesaler, bookstore systems provider, and distance learning distribution service in the United States. As one of mid-Missouri's most established and esteemed private employers, MBS can offer a heightened learning environment through its interactive and enhanced eBooks and eContent tools to the secondary and higher education communities in Columbia.

The availability of Google's ultra-high speed broadband would:

• Increase access to interactive eBooks and other digital learning materials
• Allow for course materials to be distributed and downloaded more quickly
• Heighten the learning experience for K-12 and higher education students
• Establish academic communities and networks
• Foster inventive learning methods
• Shorten the "digital divide" that currently exists

Why 1 Gbs Matters for Civic Engagement

There are many ways in which Columbia aggressively pursues citizen participation. Just to highlight a few:

• It is home to the country's premiere school of journalism, whose mission is to help inform the public sphere so that citizens can make better decisions for their communities.
• City government has its own television channel for broadcasting live city council meetings and offering a wide-range of consumer-friendly, pre-taped programs.
• The PedNet Coalition is a consortium of government, business, education and citizen members working to enhance non-motorized transportation and quality of life in Columbia.
• The University of Missouri School of Law runs the foremost center for dispute resolution in the country. A local business, Mediateme LLC, is also bringing mediation into the mainstream via video-enabled web services.

Links to Existing Initiatives

• Future Media/Reynolds Journalism Institute
• Student Competitions
• Strategic Communication and Youth Media Initiatives
• Dispute Resolution: The University of Missouri School of Law Dispute Resolution Center and MediateMe video-based online dispute resolution

RJI Media Partners

The Missouri School of Journalism operates its own professional media outlets. The Columbia Missourian is the city's morning newspaper. KBIA-FM is among the nation's highest-rated NPR affiliates. And KOMU-TV, the area's NBC affiliate, is the only commercial station in the country where students, faculty and staff produce all local news programming.

RJI is also collaborating actively with forward-leaning new media companies in Columbia, including Newsy.com (a multi-perspective video news service – see below) and Pure (a digital media agency). Through these entrepreneurial businesses and students, RJI and the city of Columbia have access to bright minds and big ideas to exploit super high-speed Internet services.

One of the most exciting potential applications of the fiber project is multimedia-enhanced crowdsourcing of local news stories with the ability of citizen journalists to upload content or be interviewed in real time. There are many possible models for such an effort. For example, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced today a grant to fund a Midwest “Food, Fuel and Society” reporting network comprised of public media organizations in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Texas. RJI and Columbia's NPR station, KBIA-FM, are key partners in this initiative. The ability to tap the expertise of local residents and university experts through the Google platform will allow more timely, more compelling and more relevant coverage of issues that matter to all of us: what we eat, how we generate and consume energy, and how science and technology affect food and fuel.

• http://www.columbiamissourian.com
• http://www.kbia.org
• http://www.komu.com
• http://www.newsy.com
• http://www.puremidmo.com
• http://www.circlabs.com
• http://kbia.org

Why 1 Gbs Matters for Business/Consumer Relationships

Many Columbia businesses are already making key development and distribution decisions based on the available bandwidth of their customers. These companies are either making compromises on the quality of media they are distributing and/or are stuck with higher development and distribution costs as a result of their inability to move certain services to the cloud.

Several area companies are uniquely positioned to provide excellent test beds for measuring how ultra-high speed broadband connections could affect their product development, customer experiences, and business models.

Existing Business Initiatives

IBM Datacenter
With the recent announcement of an IBM datacenter moving to Columbia, our digital infrastructure needs are bound to to grow.

Miller's Professional Imaging and Mpix

Miller's Professional Imaging is the largest digital imaging lab in the United States for professional photographers. Between their professional customers and their consumer brand, Mpix, they receive massive amounts of high-resolution images per day. They are equipped with multiple fiber lines to accept incoming image uploads from their customers, but they still have to make many decisions based on the bandwidth limitations of those customers. If bandwidth were not an issue, then they would have the ability to demonstrate the following:

• Cost-savings on moving traditionally desktop-based apps to the cloud.
• New user interaction models for traditionally high-bandwidth media.
• More immersive consumer-facing imaging applications which would have implications for services in the broader digital imaging industry such as Picasa, Picnik, Shutterfly, Smugmug, and more.

Newsy
Newsy.com is a multi-source online video news site that monitors, analyzes and distributes to viewers around the world the world's news coverage. Headed by industry veteran Jim Spencer (formerly VP for Answers and Content at Ask.com, GM of News and Information Programming at AOL, and director of strategic partnerships at NBC for MSNBC.com), Newsy is delivering high-quality original content to a broad audience of news consumers. The Columbia startup currently generates each piece of video content into nine different formats to accommodate different platforms and connection speeds. Having customers with a 1Gb broadband connection would have a dramatic impact on not only the quality of product Newsy could produce, but also the different opportunities for interaction with their viewers.

Foliotek
Foliotek is one of the leading electronic portfolio systems for colleges and universities across the world. In addition to being a repository of digital assets, Foliotek also provides a three-way bridge between student, educational faculty and staff, and early employers of the student. This bridge can have a profound impact on ongoing professional development and the continued evaluation of the success of the student and ultimately the educational institution.

The availability of ultra-high speed broadband would do the following:

• Increase the quality and diversity of artifacts to be stored in student repositories.
• Increase access to these artifacts by other key users.
• Open up opportunities for video-based professional development between students, educational organizations, and prospective employers.

Distributed Processing

The ability to do distributed processing locally over a 1G network would provide significant cost advantages to companies such as telematter.com, a three-person software development firm located in Columbia. Telematter has identified three different applications of use to small businesses:

Purchasing distributed software using spare computer cycles to help subsidize the cost of establishing an ultra-high speed network into the home. This model would greatly enhance the ability to bridge the “digital divide” and serve at-risk families in the community.

Not being located near a big datacenter, companies such as Telematter have to resort to paying high server costs in remote locations outside of their control. Using a local connection would enable them to host their own hardware, significantly reducing their costs.

Telematter does a lot of text parsing and xml processing on the order of millions of small xml/txt files. To scale this out they have to use distributed file systems and distributed programming techniques that require tens to hundreds of thousands of computers. Hosting these remotely is possible but extremely expensive -- hosting on commodity hardware locally would take the cost factor down significantly and allow many local development startups to take advantage of producing applications by small teams that can scale quickly and inexpensively.