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The IV edition of the Aporta Challenge, whose motto has revolved around 'The value of data for health and well-being of citizens', has already announced its three winners. The competition, promoted by Red.es in collaboration with the Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, launched in November 2021 with an ideas competition and continued earlier this summer with a selection of ten finalist proposals.

As in the three previous editions, the selected candidates had a three month period to transform their ideas into a prototype, which they presented in person at the final gala.

In a post-pandemic context, where health plays an increasingly important role, the theme of the competition sought to identify, recognise and reward ideas aimed at improving the efficiency of this sector with solutions based on the use of open data.

On 18 October, the ten finalists came to the Red.es headquarters to present their proposals to a jury made up of representatives from public administrations, organisations linked to the digital economy, universities and data communities. In just twelve minutes, they had to summarise the purpose of the proposed project or service, explain how the development process had been carried out, what data they had used, and dwell on aspects such as the economic viability or traceability of the project or service.

Ten innovative projects to improve the health sector

The ten proposals presented to the jury showed a high level of innovation, creativity, rigour and public vocation. They were also able to demonstrate that it is possible to improve the quality of life of citizens by creating initiatives that monitor air quality, build solutions to climate change or provide a quicker response to a sudden health problem, among other examples.

For all these reasons, it is not surprising that the jury had a difficult time choosing the three winners of this fourth edition. In the end, HelpVoice initiative won the first prize of €5,000, the Hospital Morbidity Survey won the €4,000 linked to second place and RIAN, the Intelligent Activity and Nutrition Recommender, closed the ranking with third place and €3,000 as an award.

First prize: HelpVoice!

• Team: Data Express, composed of Sandra García, Antonio Ríos and Alberto Berenguer.

HelpVoice! is a service that helps our elderly through voice recognition techniques based on automatic learning. Thus, in an emergency situation, the user only need to click on a device that can be an emergency button, a mobile phone or home automation tools and tell about their symptoms. The system will send a report with the transcript and predictions to the nearest hospital, speeding up the response of the healthcare workers.

In parallel, HelpVoice! will also recommend to the patient what to do while waiting for the emergency services. Regarding the use of data, the Data Express team has used open information such as the map of hospitals in Spain and uses speech and sentiment recognition data in text.

Second prize: The Hospital Morbidity Survey

• Team: Marc Coca Moreno

This is a web environment based on MERN, Python and Pentaho tools for the analysis and interactive visualisation of the Hospital Morbidity Survey microdata. The entire project has been developed with open source and free tools and both the code and the final product will be openly accessible.

To be precise, it offers 3 main analyses with the aim of improving health planning:

• Descriptive: hospital discharge counts and time series.
• KPIs: standardised rates and indicators for comparison and benchmarking of provinces and communities.
• Flows: count and analysis of discharges from a hospital region and patient origin.

All data can be filtered according to the variables of the dataset (age, sex, diagnoses, circumstance of admission and discharge, etc.).

In this case, in addition to the microdata from the INE Hospital Morbidity Survey, statistics from the Continuous Register (also from the INE), data from the ICD10 diagnosis catalogues of the Ministry of Health and from the catalogues and indicators of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and of the Autonomous Communities, such as Catalonia: catalogues and stratification tools, have also been integrated.

You can see the result of this work here.

Third prize: RIAN - Intelligent Activity and Nutrition Recommender

• Team: RIAN Open Data Team, composed of Jesús Noguera y Raúl Micharet..

This project was created to promote healthy habits and combat overweight, obesity, sedentary lifestyles and poor nutrition among children and adolescents. It is an application designed for mobile devices that uses gamification techniques, as well as augmented reality and artificial intelligence algorithms to make recommendations.

Users have to solve personalised challenges, individually or collectively, linked to nutritional aspects and physical activities, such as gymkhanas or games in public green spaces.

In relation to the use of open data, the pilot uses data related to green areas, points of interest, greenways, activities and events belonging to the cities of Malaga, Madrid, Zaragoza and Barcelona. In addition, these data are combined with nutritional recommendations (food data and nutritional values and branded food products) and data for food recognition by images from Tensorflow or Kaggle, among others.

Alberto Martínez Lacambra, Director General of Red.es presents the awards and announces a new edition

The three winners were announced by Alberto Martínez Lacambra, Director General of Red.es, at a ceremony held at Red.es headquarters on 27 October. The event was attended by several members of the jury, who were able to talk to the three winning teams.

Martínez Lacambra also announced that Red.es is already working to shape the V Aporta Challenge, which will focus on the value of data for the improvement of the common good, justice, equality and equity.

Once again this year, the Aporta Initiative would like to congratulate the three winners, as well as to thank the work and talent of all the participants who decided to invest their time and knowledge in thinking and developing proposals for the fourth edition of the Aporta Challenge.

The ISEAK Foundation is a research and transfer center in the field of economics, specialized in the evaluation of public policies on employment, inequalities, inclusion or gender.

If there is a field in which data are of great importance, it is in health. Through indicators obtained from various diagnostic tests and our history, doctors can know what is happening in our body, decide what treatment we should take and estimate how we are going to evolve. But for their estimates to be correct, external data have also been necessary, which have contributed to the acquisition of greater knowledge about different ailments.

When we talk about open data in health we refer to both medical data and other related data that can also have an impact on the health of patients and the services provided. Some examples are:

• Data from medical studies and research. The sharing of clinical and research data has several benefits: it enhances the reproducibility of trials, their verification and reliability, while creating opportunities for new discoveries, among other advantages. In this sense, Directive (EU) 2019/1024, relating to open data and the reuse of public sector information, obliges Member States to adopt open access policies for publicly funded research data. In addition, there are numerous initiatives in the world that promote the opening of this type of data such as the Research Data Alliance. In our country we find proposals such as Datasea, wave Maredata network, which has a guide to guide the opening of these data.
• Well-being related data. The environment, the diet we eat, the sleep pattern, the balance between work and private life, the stress or the physical exercise we do are also patterns closely linked to our state of health, since they can affect our immune system or even our mental health. Many times this type of data is obtained through surveys and statistics that link health and well-being. In Spain, the INE, for example, carries out the five-year National Health Survey, where information is asked about perceived morbidity and use of health services, but also about lifestyle habits and preventive activities. These data are provided in the open so that they can be reused in various studies.
• Data related to health services and management, such as the location of medical centers or pharmacies, schedules or complaints received in hospitals. All of them can be very useful for patients, but also for public bodies when making decisions that improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the health service. These data are often provided by autonomous entities, responsible for their management.
• Patient records. Patient data is also a great source of knowledge, which can be extrapolated to other cases. During the COVID pandemic we have seen how it was necessary to have as much information as possible about the evolution of the disease, since doctors and epidemiologists faced an unknown and documented ailment. The Spanish Society of Internal Medicine (SEMI) has developed a Registration on-line with epidemiological, clinical, treatment, laboratory and radiographic parameters. Another initiative of interest is HealthData 29, a platform that allows healthcare providers and other entities to safely make their open data sets available to the community for research purposes, and which currently has data from LaLiga, Sanitas and HM hospitals. Both are data-sharing initiatives where you need to register or write to request the information.

It should be noted that the anonymization of data - always necessary when talking about open data - is essential to respect patient privacy and sometimes makes opening this type of information difficult.

More than 16,000 health and wellness data at datos.gob.es

In datos.gob.es there is 9,530 data sets in the health category and 7,388 in society and well-being. While the first category includes data directly related to health, such as medical services, health surveys or death data, the second includes data related to active aging, marginalization, personal autonomy, dependency or disability, among other categories more related to society. These categories respond to what is indicated in the Technical Standard for Interoperability for the Reuse of Information Resources.

The main publishers of this type of data are the Canary Institute of statistics, the Statistics National Institute and the Sociological Research Center.

From these data sets, below, we collect the most important ones together with the format in which you can consult them:

1.Statewide

• Ministry of Health. Evolution of the COVID-19 disease. PDF, HTML, CSV.
• Ministry of Health. Vaccination strategy for the coronavirus (COVID-19). HTML.
• INE. Registered physicians by year and sex. CSV, XLSX, XLS, HTML, JSON, PC-Axis
• Institute for the Elderly and Social Services. Management of the System for Autonomy and Attention to Dependency (SAAD). Pdf, XLS
• INE. Statistics of domestic violence and gender violence. HTML.

2.At the CC.AA. level

• Junta Castilla y León. COVID-19 vaccination in Castilla y León. XLSX, CSV.
• Madrid's Community. Register of social services centers. JSON, CSV.
• Generalitat of Catalunya. Hotlines against sexist violence 900 900 120. XML, RDF-XML, JSON, CSV.
• Xunta de Galicia. Map of the health services of Galicia. KML.
• Autonomous Community of Castilla-La Mancha.Accommodation resources for people with physical disabilities in Castilla-La Mancha. XLS, CSV.

3.Locally

• Vitoria-Gasteiz City Council. Drinking water sources in the municipality. OCTET-STREAM.
• Valencia City Council. Noise map for 24 hours. OCTET-STREAM, WFS, WMS.
• Alcobendas City Council.Pollen concentrations. XML, XLS, JSON, ODS, CSV.
• City of Madrid. Inspections for official food control in food establishments. XLS, CSV
• Zaragoza City Council. Pharmacy. API.
• Lorca City Council. Association of social minorities. HTML, XLS, JSON, XML, CSV.

This data can be reused in research and to create services and products related to health, such as those collected in this article.

Do you know of any initiative to open health data? You can share it with us in the comments or send us an email to contacto@datos.gob.es. We will be delighted to read you

Content prepared by the datos.gob.es team.

Is it possible to find in the data the necessary help to solve the real problems that our society faces? While it is true that data alone cannot be transformed into food for the most disadvantaged, nor can it make weapons disappear in conflict zones or inequalities in the world, they are very useful when it comes to providing information on the causes that cause certain events or situations. Thanks to them, we can better assess the reasons and consequences of these situations, and act so that they do not recur.

Once, thanks to open data, we identify the causes that cause these types of events, we must take one more step: use this information to develop solutions and services that help us solve problems such as, for example, the lack of social inclusion of marginalized groups or inequalities caused by gender, economic or social issues.

When we speak of inclusion, we refer to the process by which both individuals and communities of people, such as migrants, refugees, socially disadvantaged groups or individuals, can interact and integrate in their communities in a satisfactory way and with the same opportunities.

Next, we will see some examples of the importance of open data when creating instruments and services that help the integration of this type of groups, focusing especially on the challenges that our country faces.

Problems related to inequality in Spain and digital solutions based on open data to solve them

Labor insertion

In a context where the health crisis is damaging our economy, it is essential to bring job opportunities closer to citizens. The open publication of job offers and courses, as the Basque Employment Service does through its Lanbide platform, is allowing many job web portals and training centers to add these offers to their catalog easily, promoting their dissemination and , therefore, the labor insertion of job seekers.

Depopulation of rural areas

Currently in Spain it is necessary to make users more visible and aware of the great depopulation problem suffered by some areas of our country, in which its inhabitants have less and less social resources, which sometimes leads to increasing their isolation.

Tool such as "La España Vacía", which consists of a series of interactive maps that show the Spanish demographic evolution, help us to make visible and understand the problem, while platforms such as Plan Repuebla can serve to attract businesses and new inhabitants to areas with lower population density.

Gender inequality 

There are platforms that function as a great channel of awareness and support for women victims of sexist violence, offering testimonies and analysis of the current situation. This is the case of Desprotegides, a portal created in Catalonia that seeks to make visible the serious problem of sexist violence suffered by thousands of women in the world today, in this case with updated data on the number of victims in the Catalan community.

One step further goes the Data COVID Gender project created by the Barcelona Open Data Initiative together with the Gender and ICT group (GENTIC) of the Internet Interdisciplicary Institute (IN3). The project consists of analyzing the impact that gender and occupational segregation have on the prevalence of the coronavirus. It has been one of the 15 proposals chosen by the Catalan Health Quality and Evaluation Agency (Aquas) of the Department of Health to carry out research in data analytics on the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 in Catalonia.

Integration of people with disabilities

In recent years, simple applications that, using open data, provide useful information about the environment. In this article you can find different applications created by companies and citizens, but also public services are working in this regard. As an example, the city of Murcia has launched a free application that allows people with hearing disabilities to receive information about municipal services and carry out the procedures they request by way of videoconference through a smartphone.

Relevant information about the coronavirus for risk groups

Curvaenaragon.com is a web page developed by the Government of Aragon whose main objective is to show updated information on the situation of Covid-19 in the autonomous community, breaking down the data by the different provinces (Huesca, Zaragoza and Teruel).

This website allows all citizens who reside or have to travel to Aragon to consult the evolution of the pandemic in the area, especially for the risk groups that are most vulnerable to this pathology.

In short, there are more and more applications and technologies that, thanks to open data, allow us to obtain useful information about the environment in order to offer solutions to problems such as inequality, disability, poverty or violence, among others.

These are just some examples of applications that use open data to favor the eradication of inequality, but if you know of any other that fulfills a similar function, do not hesitate to register it on our portal or send us an email to contacto@datos.gob.es

Content elaborated by datos.gob.es team.

Earlier this year the World Bank announced that its next annual World Development Report would focus on the role of data in development. Each annual report of the World Bank has always been an important milestone in the world of development, but the next report, scheduled for next year, will be even more special because it is the first one focus on the world of data.

We already know that the main theme guiding the development of the report will be "Data for Better Lives", and it will be based on the premise that, while recent years have shown that high-quality data are indispensable tools for effective public policy formulation, the availability of the data needed for proper decision-making is still too low today. As a consequence, a large part of the value of data remains untapped.

Thus, the final objective of the report is to understand the barriers to the proper exploitation of data in the developing world and to explore two possible avenues that together would lead to the solution needed to unlock the full potential of these data:

• On the one hand, addressing data governance considerations and making the necessary changes in the way data is collected, managed, analysed and used in the current global environment.
•     On the other hand, by considering how combining public and private data could lead to better results, with public data offering better coverage of populations of interest and private data with greater frequency, timeliness and granularity.

To this end, the World Bank team has been working on an initial draft as a proof of concept, explaining their vision of how data could have a positive impact on development, while introducing us to the other issues to be addressed by the report, including: "the use of data in public policy, data in the private sphere, synergies triggered by data, and the various challenges in terms of infrastructure, regulatory systems, economic policies and data management systems that we will have to face in the process".

In addition, the World Bank has prepared a round of consultations that will run until the end of this month and which aim to deeply understand the scope of the challenges outlined by answering a number of questions:

How can data contribute to development? 

It seeks to understand how data can contribute to improving people's lives in the context of global development, as well as the role of governments and data markets in making more effective use of data. It will also discuss how data can be used to understand the impact of public policies and improve services while mitigating potential risks associated with their intensive use, and how data must be managed to make this possible.

What are the current gaps in national data systems? 

To explore what types of resources and investments will be needed, both financially and humanly, to realize the long-term vision of a large data system that can unify data management. This system will be managed by a fully resourced government agency. In this aspect, it is also fundamental to understand what barriers managers and users face through the different layers of the infrastructure.

What are the legal and regulatory challenges? 

The objective is to establish the legal basis and the necessary actors to establish and regulate reliable data flows, maximizing their benefits while minimizing the possible associated risks. Here the key will probably lie in finding the right balance between sometimes conflicting concepts such as openness, transparency, right to information, interoperability, accountability, privacy and security.

What are the economic policy challenges? 

The report will analyse what is the real impact on less developed countries of an economy that is increasingly driven by data, resulting in a large market concentration in a rather limited number of companies that in turn have the largest capitalization values in the world today. Enabling appropriate policies to ensure competitive markets, adequate trade rules and a fair taxation scheme will be crucial for those countries that are currently disadvantaged by large private players.

This initial round of consultations will remain open until the end of the month and during this time anyone can provide comments on the general concept of the report through this form. The authors of the report are also particularly interested in good practices and examples of how the data has helped improve the lives of those most in need to date, and encourage anyone who want to share a case directly through WDR2021@worldbank.org. 

The next stages in the development of the report will also be announced through the website they have prepared to coordinate all work until the final version is made public early next year.

The public sector is not only a great provider of open data, but also one of its main users. Open data facilitates contact and direct communication between governments and citizens. This can drive more efficient and effective public policies.

Among other areas, open data has great potential to develop policies and tools that contribute to the protection of minorities and groups at risk of social exclusion. These social groups often find difficult to participate fully in society. For that reason, we need mechanisms to sensitize all citizens and create opportunities, reducing inequalities and discrimination.

The interest of governments in this field is evident. As an example, events such as the International Open Data Conference (IODC), whose agenda includes multiple spaces focused on social justice, immigrant integration and gender issues.

In Spain, resources are also being allocated to open this type of data, and organizations are carrying out initiatives aimed at social improvements.

Greater openness of data linked to social indicators

In different Spanish regions, organizations are creating specific spaces to share data that foster social debate around inequality.

One example is The Observatory of inequality in Aragon, created with the aim of "providing transparency to the evolution and effects of inequality". This portal provides indicators related to different categories such as employment, disability, dependency, care for the elderly, housing, family or immigration, among other categories.

In the same vein, we find The Observatory of the Social Reality of Navarra, whose objective is "the research, planning and evaluation of public policies focused on social services, employment and housing, as well as the analysis of the processes of social transformation and the social problems in the Autonomous Community ". With this objective, it offers various statistics, indicators and studies on levels of employment, immigration, dependency or international cooperation, among others.

But not only public organizations are concerned about this issue. Private companies have also promoted websites such as The Social Observatory of La Caixa, where their own indicators are published openly. This contribute to a better diagnosis of the social reality.

Thanks to the opening and dissemination of this type of information, citizens can make an informed judgment and demand effective improvements. In addition, NGOs can better understand the reality they face and suggest specific improvement actions.

Tools to facilitate integration

The opening of this type of data has also facilitated the creation of mechanisms and tools aimed at facilitating the integration of groups in vulnerable situations. In recent years, state and local public authorities have supported different events, contests, hackathons, etc. to promote applications and new services that help inclusion. This is the case of 'Accede' project, promoted by the Accessibility area of the City of Málaga. This project will facilitate the creation of an easy and intuitive application to boost urban accessibility for the elderly and people with functional diversity, using open data from the municipality.

Another example, coming from the private sector, is "Ni un hogar sin energía" (No home without energy), a platform based on open data promoted by Ecodes to save energy and avoid energy poverty. Thanks to this platform, citizens who need help can receive information about social aid, initiatives and projects aimed at improving energy efficiency and access to energy.

In short, the analysis and reuse of open data is allowing administrations to bring their policies to the public. Likewise, a more informed society can elaborate its own informed judgments and promote policies that facilitate the integration and social inclusion of vulnerable groups.

According to the United Nations Agency for Refugees (UNHCR), we are currently witnessing the highest levels of displacement of people registered in recent history. In 2019, it is estimated that more than 70 million people have been forced to leave their homes, including 25.9 million legal refugees, more than half of them minors. Almost every two seconds a new person is forced to move by force as a result of a conflict or persecution, 37,000 people each day. More than a half of these displaced people come from only three countries - Syria, Afghanistan and South Sudan - and are mostly hosted by other bordering countries.

Open data and resources on immigration and refugees

All these data are provided by UNHCR itself, and they are useful not only as a first approximation to understanding the magnitude of the problem we face, but also as the first example of how open data can also be useful to analyze, confront and find solutions for the refugee crisis. And it is that the UN refugee agency has a large amount of open data resources related to the subject, including for example a historical dashboard of refugee movement flows or the map of refugee crises, through which you can access detailed profiles of specific cases. Other useful tools that they provide us with are the resettlement data search engine and also the indicators of drinking water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) whose objective is to guarantee a decent minimum conditions for all the displaced. Its office for coordination of humanitarian actions also has a simple but very interesting catalog of open humanitarian data (which includes immigration) and a section with many other resources and tools.

In addition, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) - also related to the United Nations - has its own open data portal on migration that will be very useful not only when analyzing the variables that influence the flows of migration and the impact that these have on the most vulnerable groups, but also other certainly interesting aspects such as migration policies in different countries or the evolution of the impact of public opinion on the migrant group.

As we have seen, the United Nations, together with its partner agencies, is probably currently the most complete source of data available on the subject, but it is not the only one. Other relevant international entities also have their specific databases on immigration, such as the World Bank, although perhaps with more limited resources. There are also other non-governmental organizations, such as openmigration.org or the Internal Displacement Observation Center (iDMC) that offer us their dashboards to analyze data, their own databases, very useful infographics to make the problema visible, risk prediction tools, historical series of refugee displacements and fact-checking tools to verify, contrast and complement official data.

Reuse of open refugee data

On the other hand, apart from all the possible sources of data and tools that we have seen so far, it is also interesting to observe the use that others are making of those data and the other available resources. For example, some interesting use cases may be the collaborative analysis of the open images of UNOSAT for support in humanitarian crises, the analysis of the role of open data in the Syrian crisis or the study on the impact of immigration on the criminality in Hong Kong. Other examples are case studies published by some European countries, reports for emergency response coordination or, purely academic, the creation of predictive models of immigration flows made from multiple data sources, which include other conditions such as weather or relevant news.

Also noteworthy are initiatives such as Data for Refugees or HackforHomeless, which through practical and collaborative workshops (in the style of hackathon) foster a new approach to social impact through innovation in the treatment of refugee crises, using data as a tool to find solutions that contribute to improving the living conditions and basic rights of the displaced, acting in areas such as security, health, education, employment and integration.

Finally, although we have seen several examples of how open data can once again be a very useful tool when it comes to understanding and trying to alleviate the growing problem of displaced and refugee people, we must not forget that as a particularly vulnerable group it is essential to guarantee at the same time their privacy and the adequate protection of their personal data. That is why other organizations, such as the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) or the Red Cross, have published their own recommendations to ensure privacy protection and avoide unwanted damage due to to the potential abuse of that data.

So, once again, we see how the greater the variety of data available, the more resources we will have to analyze, understand and respond to the problems in our society. Being able to guarantee the availability of adequate data is becoming a necessary condition when defining all types of public policies with greater success.

Content prepared by Carlos Iglesias, Open data Researcher and consultan, World Wide Web Foundation.

Contents and points of view expressed in this publication are the exclusive responsibility of its author.