Beyond the Basket: Shopping Data and AI in Disease Forecasting and Women’s Health
Data Grand Round: 10 Oct 2025

Beyond the Basket: Shopping Data and AI in Disease Forecasting and Women’s Health

Presented by: Dr Lizzie Dolan, Research Fellow in Health Data Science at the University of Nottingham’s N/LAB research centre

Dr Lizzie Dolan is a Research Fellow in Health Data Science at the University of Nottingham’s N/LAB research centre. She specialises in applying AI, machine learning, and large-scale consumer data to public health, with a focus on early detection, disease monitoring, and health inequalities. Her research spans ovarian cancer, respiratory illness, and urogenital infections, with women’s health as a central theme. Lizzie also contributes to the national evaluation of the Pharmacy First service and wider studies on nutrition, food environments, and inequalities in access and behaviour.

HDR Midlands Data Grand Round – Friday 10th October 2025 @ 12.30pm [Online via Teams]

Synopsis:

Shopping data offers a unique and underused lens on health, capturing everyday behaviours that often precede diagnosis or treatment. In this session, I will present my research on how transactional and loyalty card data can be applied in health, including studies I have led on respiratory disease and ovarian cancer. I will then discuss my current work in women’s health, focusing on the potential to use shopping data to uncover patterns in urogenital conditions such as bacterial vaginosis (BV). By combining consumer data with machine learning and explainable AI, my research highlights both the opportunities and the challenges of developing earlier, more equitable, and interpretable approaches to disease detection and public health.

HDR UK Midlands Data Grand Round:

The HDR UK Midlands Data Grand Round takes place each month at lunchtime for one hour and participants discuss a specific research topic at each meeting.

The research topic of interest is presented at each meeting, followed by a Q&A session which usually leads into an in-depth discussion.

The meetings are online [virtual meetings] and are recorded for any members of our community that are unable to join us, which are then made available to view via the HDR UK Midlands website.

The meetings are Chaired by our HDR UK Midlands Directors, who give a short HDR UK Midlands business update at the start of each meeting.

We’d love you to join us!

Session Chair: Fiona Pearce