New PDA Listens To Your Heartbeat

Roland Piquepaille writes "CardioNet Inc., a company based in San Diego, has developed a wireless technology to monitor heart patients. According to this Computerworld article, the technology was 'originally developed by Qualcomm Inc. to track and send messages to large truck fleets.' CardioNet's service is initially focused on the 2 million U.S. people suffering from arrhythmia. Each patient is equipped with a PDA-type electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring device connected by a short-range wireless system to electrodes on his chest. Data is sent to his doctor via a built-in cell phone chip. More details, including a diagram and pictures showing how the system works are also available."

Comments

Re:well

[in7ane]

Ahh, but better yet are the false positives when it gets disconnected etc.

I think it would be more useful for monitoring (heart beat up, irregular - shove into a database, data-mine, look for high risk 'patterns') rather than notifying people of your death.

Possibilities

[tomakaan]

I think this presents some neat possibilities beyond the mentioned focuses. It'd be pretty cool to have a PDA respond differently to you based on your heart rate (which can be an indicator to certain emotions).