Sport England

Developed with Microsoft - contact Matthew.Smith@Microsoft.com

Deriving health benefits from open data

There are many open data initiatives in the public realm, often with the aim of supporting innovation of new products, services and especially businesses. The aim of this project is to show how consumer cloud capabilities (analytics, web service delivery etc..) can be combined with public data to efficiently generate and deliver new cloud services for societal and/or business benefits.

The Sport England Open Data Initiative is keen to find people who can do interesting things with data that has been published through OpenActive so far. Over the past few months they have been working with activity providers (leisure operators, national governing bodies and smaller activity providers) to open up data about the opportunities they provide. This data consists of the sort of things a customer might want to know when deciding to take part in an activity - e.g. type of activity, date, time, location, difficulty, etc.

Their focus now is to find and support people who can create customer-facing tools and services that can help people find activities and become active. They are launching an incubator early next year and are doing some work to frame the sort of implementations they are looking for, but some potential use cases could:

• support parents and children to find activities

• be used in a healthcare setting (e.g. GPs finding activities for their patients)

• emphasise the social aspect of physical activity (e.g. can I find activities with other people like me?)

The Initiative is interested in whether students, equipped with Microsoft’s cloud capabilities and their data can generate cool new products. The project is very open ended… basically what cool new product/service could you propose by combining the data, technology and your own ingenuity.