Planned community Lake Nona collects residents’ data for longitudinal health study

ORLANDO – Juan Santos, SVP of brand experience and innovation at the Tavistock Group and innovator in Orlando’s planned community Lake Nona, kicked off the Venture Connect Program at HIMSS24.

“If you read about Lake Nona, it has been called Medical City by the media,” Santos said. “The reason for this is that at the core of Lake Nona, at the base of who we are, we have a very solid healthcare ecosystem.” 

Lake Nona is home to the University of Central Florida College of Medicine, Orlando VA Medical Center and Nemours Children’s Hospital. 

The community has 24,000 residents, and citizens can go from pre-K to MD/PhD without leaving the community. The average cost of residency is 15% to 20% higher than surrounding areas, and there are no criteria for people to live there. 

“We have a full ecosystem, and that’s the first piece of what we do,” Santos said. “When people hear about health and healthcare in a community, the first thought, of course, is to the medical institutions. We’re super proud to have the partners that we have with the VA and UCF and all the great people in the medical field that are there.”

Santos said Lake Nona also believes mental health and the general wellbeing of the community population are important. 

The homeowners association offers yoga in the park, meditation, internet access, a tennis campus, races and art fairs. 

Santos said that the company has run a longitudinal health study continuously since the community was built nine years ago, which shows it created a healthy environment for the people living there. 

“We have an environment that has great physical infrastructure, everything from single-family homes to apartments. You have Fortune 50, and you have startups. There are retail areas, restaurants and parking garages. So, great physical infrastructure,” Santos said.

The community also has a deep technical infrastructure, including a cloud-based data infrastructure that collects behavioral data about what people in the community are doing.

“In this physical infrastructure, digital infrastructure and human environment, we have something that we call a smart and responsive city,” Santos said. “Our purpose is to remove friction and make experiences better by engaging more actively and effectively with people and creating these living environments.” 

The community offers homes or “a living lab” dubbed WHIT, a Wellness Home Built on Innovation and Technology. 

WHIT includes details designed to empower residents to live healthier lives, such as a Sleep Sanctuary, a Wellness Kitchen, dynamic lighting and technologies for fitness, rest and relaxation. 

There is also a network of systems that collects data in real time about how people are connected. The data helps the company visualize and control how the city reacts. The data is used to correlate living behaviors to health outcomes. 

“You have these processes that sit on the cloud right now … that take the open APIs for data vendors or for the different people that give us IT and technology services, they read the data, and they hand it off,” Santos said.

He continued that as long as the system has an open and documented API, which most systems have, then the company can capture that data and publish it, and organizations like UCF can use the same infrastructure to publish data. 

The company also creates a digital twin environment, a high-resolution 3D representation of the space around individuals, used to test things like crosswalks, shadows in an environment and the appearance of homes.

The technology also provides a geographic dashboard with data-related temperature and heat maps.

The company is working to connect the two forms of data to analyze how changes in different areas of the community will affect the community and its residents. 

Santos said the endeavor has its challenges, notably ensuring privacy and moving the design beyond the Lake Nona community.