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A Black Box for People
lightwaveman writes "Developed for astronauts, a small device called 'the CPOD' does for people what black boxes do for airplanes. It's a compact, portable, wearable device -- a single piece of equipment that gathers a wide variety of vital signs. About the size of a computer mouse, a CPOD is worn around the waist. It's comfortable enough to be worn while sleeping. It's non-invasive. It takes only minutes to don. Importantly, it can track a person's physiologic functioning as they go about their normal routine -- they don't have to be tethered to some stationary device. It can store data for eight-hour periods for later downloading; alternatively, it can send it wirelessly, in real time, to some other device."
This is exactly what I have been looking for! If only it could be made so that it is hard to remove then it would be perfect for my daughter....
All the "invasion of privacy" posts that will follow from the fact that this can transmit your vitals wirelessly. I guess in this case it is somewhat true, but then again, what do I care if someone knows my heartrate is 84 and increases to 108 whenever a hot blond walks up?
Trolling is a art,
And they're going to make us wear them, right?
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
If they can make the cpod keep working after a human dies- why don't they just make the whole human out of the same stuff as the cpod?
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Sounds like a glorafied tape recorder to me, you know, the kind lawyers and college kids use.
Will it die for your sins, though?
...make the whole astronaut out of these? Sorry. lame joke.
The following replies are posted by unwashed nerds.
I was thinking they were going to make a black box to put people *in*... it seems that thing always survives the crash, so it only seems logical to make the entire plane/car out of the stuff...
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
but I'm white. Where is my whitebox?
Something else for the hypochondriacs to buy to make sure they aren't sick
Something else for the Tin-Hat crowd to complain about
Something else that has a reasonably good medical use
High tech
But does it run Linux? And if so, which distro?
I'm so confused as to whether I like this idea or not.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
Sounds very much like the Medical Mood Ring.
I Thought it said "A Box for Black People", man I should really drink more coffee in the morning.
keanmarine.com
From the pictures, that looks like one LARGE computer mouse... I have serious doubts I'd find it comfortable to sleep with that thing strapped to my waist.
:p
At any rate... this is yet another one of those inventions that make me think "What? We didn't have that yet? Must've just been in some novel I read..."
Still wonder what CPOD stands for, the article doesn't seem to explain.
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
is it good to have a wireless signal so close to one's testicles 24 hours a day?
This could be a medical breakthrough. There are so many times when you may have spurratic symptoms and when you go see the doctor he can't see any of them. With this he can see when something was happening what was going on. Help send them in a better direction. This could really help people out.
Evolution or ID?
does it play ogg?! that's the important question!
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
... under my tinfoil hat!
One of my friends works as a carer in an old peopels home, she reckons this thing could be really helpful (since they are massively understaffed).
The /. writeup led me to believe this was for people with medical problems, but it looks like it was developed mostly for astronauts. Neat stuff. Only one thing, I'm a little disappointed by the size of the box and the need to hook all of those probes up to you. Shouldn't we have some of this crap woven right into space suits by now? I mean, it's 2004, and the best we can do is this big ugly box strapped to your chest?
Yeah, I know. I watch too much sci-fi.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
When you're hungry it can send that information to hot spots that can then send you ads for nearby food stuff :-)
Other than that, a good autopsy would probably suffice, eh?
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Look at the pictures. That's the size of no mouse I've used. Sleeping on that thing would be comparable to sleeping with a toaster.
something like this is being used here in estonia for some time now:
http://www.docobo.com/product/extended.html
While this specific device is most certainly new, heart monitors have been capable of doing this for years. Those are smaller than beepers and allow you (using 50baud modem technology) to transmit your history to a hospital.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
If they add a miniature harddrive and mp3 playback, I think they'll have an iPod killer!
Then you could analyse your body's response relative to your favourite music... and if you put a big enough color lcd screen on the thing, you could also have a screensaver thingie that produces psychedelic swirls based on your physiological data!
... data is always useful, and if astronauts and pilots wear these, we can get a much better picture afterward of how they met their deaths. For the price of a silly dongle hanging off their belts, this can give us a better outline of the accident.
Remember a couple of years ago about that small passenger jet that went offline, cruised until it ran out of fuel, then crashed? The fighter pilots scrambled to intercept it reported that the windows were misted over, hence they couldn't tell anything about the crew and passengers.
On the flip side, a combat vet with thousands of flying hours can find his flight status revoked due to some health metric that the flight doc didn't like. Flying a desk is a living hell for these guys.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
It implies you're too much of a fucked-up slashdot geek to have any hope whatsoever of functioning in the real world. Advice: stay in your parents' basement, forever.
It would be more useful and feasible if CPOD is wearable as a wrist watch
http://www.isolvesystems.com - Technology Marketplace
Hudson: I am ready, man. Ready to get it on. Check-it-out. I am the ultimate badass...state of the badass art. You do not want to fuck with me. Hey, Ripley, don't worry. Me and my squad of ultimate badasses will protect you. Check-it-out... Independently targetting particle-beam phalanx. VWAP! Fry half a city with this puppy. We got tactical smart-missles, phased-plasma pulse-rifles, RPG's. We got sonic eeelectronic ballbreakers, we got nukes, we got knives...sharp sticks --
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I wonder whether future versions will offer predictive capabilities? Imgine being told you are going to have a heart attack in 15 minutes? Now add wireless, and imagine have an ambulance show up, ask you to get in, and take you to the hospital just in time for your impending cardiac arrest. Gee wireless, just in time supply chain, predictive diagnostics, with that many buzzwords, its gonna be a hit for sure!
Jim Waldo recently spoke at the 7th Jini Community Meeting about the uses of these very same types of devices. Here are the slides to the presentation.
The CPOD is really just an extension of a device called a Holter Monitor that cardiologists use on their patients. Holters used to be just a tape recorder that recorded your heartbeat/respiration for up to 36-hours. Now you can get digital versions that do all that and MORE (for only $19.95! Order now!)
You can also plug them into ECG machines, have them transmit data over phone lines, via a radio while in a hospital, etc. I'm actually surprised it took NASA this long to adapt something that has been in use publicly for many years. It used to be that technology was developed by NASA and then the public sector adopted it.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Monitor
breathing
heart rate
body tempature
ekg
etc
send data to a monitoring receiver via rfid / bluetooth / wireless
And best of all, an alarm pager which you wear if the kid stops breathing, heart rate falls, etc...
I think what you are looking for is a chastity belt w/no key ;)
Oooh I've been waiting for something like this to come along. A total bio-feedback device (or as total as current technology allows). I can watch the effects of what I eat, attribute my mood to biological factors when necessary.. In fact the psychological potential is huge.
If it's the level of self-awareness that makes humans unique, then this can only lead us further in the right direction.
How do I buy one? ThinkGeek- are you working on this?
Therefore I've set my goals at becoming a mediocre academic until one day I can't stand it anymore, at which point I'll promptly go home and watch more television.
A couple of years ago, the oft-quoted PBS techno-pundit Robert X Cringely lost his son to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
In subsequent articles, he proposed a distributed computing project to try to track down the cause of SIDS by outfitting infants with wearable computers that would gather all sorts of data in the hopes of determining the cause(s) of SIDS.
He even had the brainwave of trying to sell the spare computing cycles of the devices to work on distributed processing tasks as a way to subsidize the development costs.
Communication Personelle/Professionelle Ouverts et Digital (Communication Personelle/Professionelle Open and Digital)
Typos... that's just how I role.
How about your girlfriend?
Imagine the needless fights that would ensue...
I assume that this could be the next generation 'medical alert' bracelet. Just having all that information for the paramedic team in the interim between the time where the person was incapacitated and medical treatment could be the difference between life and death. That, and of course, have the wireless reciever set with an autodialer anytime certain vitals go wild. It could be a revolution in care for the elderly and sick.
Imagine how much this could help with the training and racing of serious endurence athletes.
Imagine the US postal cycling team support car having stats in real time on all of the cyclist during the tour de france. They could tell who needs a rest and who has the energy to lead, and adjust their drafting stratagies accordingly.
The posibilities seem almost limitless...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
I wanted to say something witty and get modded funny, something about "I've fallen and can't get up!" - but I honestly think in a few months, at best, infomercials will start catering this tech to the elderly. The boomers are moving towards geriatric age, they will want a RF based device in their home that auto dials 911 if they have a heart attack or a stroke.
Right now, if I am ADT or one of the home security firms, I am aggressively looking to buy, develop or partner with a hospice firm to tie the two together.
Wasn't there a guy here who lost his daughter to some form of SIDS and was imploring the geek community to help him come up with a cheap biomonitor so tons of SIDS data could be collected and the syndrome stopped? What happened with that?
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
WTF, it can't play mp3!!1
NO FAT CHICKS.
This post is obviously on topic, because the cpod does seem to be a take-off of the ipod's design.
listen buddy. you gotta realize that it's all about attidue, you hear? attitude. you gotta put on some superficial aesthetics (shower, decent looking clothes) but attitude is where it's at. even if you are hot you're gonna get rejected. but rejection is good, it boosts your synaptic coping mechanism. keep at it buddy. find the poooooontang, it's one of the few things (maybe the only thing) that makes normal life worthy to put up with. a man cannot go without poontang, somebody that loves him and someone to love.
NASA didn't meet the deadline: 8 - 1 = 7 days late
Or you could buy a Apple and become one of those cool guys, you know, penii and stuff.
On a different note, my socks seem to smell.
If the CPOD is so indestructible, why don't they just make the rest of the human out of the same stuff?
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
(driving around with CPOD_hack tool)... "hey, there's a guy that needs a bad day."
> CPOD_hack that.guy.over.there -fake_heartattack
Some girl thinks she likes you, but isn't sure... send her CPOD a signal!
> CPOD_hack those.girls -symptoms_of_love
ha ha.
stuff |
They are not the same thing.
if only this was available years ago....Jimmy Hoffa wouldn't be "lost" (assuming that the black box could be found).
I guess it's also useful for miners too. Though I can see the potential of abuse (especially by life insurance companies). For instance, if a bunch of miners are trapped and killed when the mine caves in, the black boxes when recovered could tell how exactly they died. Well what if the insurance policy on the mine doesn't cover heart attacks or strokes caused by the stress of the accident that might have incapacitate them and they end up dying from suffication?
Big brother gets a new spin?
So like, after i die a strange death, people will be able to replay my final moments?
t hud* *crinkly* *thunk* ...
thud thud thud...
sound of traffic whirring by...
*cough*
"hey man, check out that hottie at 9 oclock"
"WHERE!?"
SCREEEECCHHH!!!
"AAAHHH!"
*
"eerrghhgh"
A racial joke is OK for some if it's remotely funny. This one's so lame it's just sad.
I can see it now... all the mods:
Warwalking mod: vibrates when you're in range of an open node
Bootcamp mod: cusses you out if your heart rate drops below a specified limit ("Get off yer ass, slacker! Double-time! hup! hup!")
slack mod: tells you to chill out if your blood pressure rises above a specified limit ("deep breath, dude... feel your chakra")
I don't know what you're doing in bed, Mr Nasa-person, but anything that is worn around the waist, other than a female, is going to be pretty darn invasive. I don't want any part of this until you can surgically implant it into my body, and its safe from all the strange exploits I may find myself indulging in from time to time.
Ahem.
Now if we can only get the Death Tapes mentioned in Robert Zelanzy's "Isle of the Dead". Of course this would violate the clonning research ban but that is a separate issue.
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
I thought Slashdot went Slaschdaut on me for a second, there.
Well, if Apple made these and called them cPods... Profit!
What next? Companions and Alibi Archives?
This place is getting a little crowded.
BC
This is not really new news. My father wore one of these things for a couple of 24 hour periods both before and after pacemaker implant. It was a fancy new one that measured more than just EKG data; tracked all kinds of stuff. His pacemaker also stores data about itself and my father. It is downloaded to a laptop through an induction interface.
I'm sure someone is working on an implanted thought recorder that reports back to Homeland Security every time you have a disloyal thought about Bush.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
obviously this isn't the homeland security asking you to wear those devices. I wouldn't even care about privacy since those devices are to be used for people on mission or for research purpose in which case, wearing something to track your statistics is mandatory.
D us t/
Even if its less invasive than the other tech however, I believe, just by looking at the picture, it hasn't reached a perfect level of freedom, it looks like an iPod-on-a-belly.
I believe freedom will truly be reached when something like this will be spinkled on people to gather their specs:
http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pister/Smart
They can fly on his own money in their own planes.
Any pilot who is either in charge of other people's lives in a commercial airliner, or millions of dollars of tax payers money in the form of an jet is not going to fly with "just a few chest pains, nothin serious" when a medical doctor who knows a lot more than he does tells him he is a risk. It's a job not a jock-hobby.
Otherwise what you say is correct, but pilots have a job and they have to be fit to do that job or accidents happen. Go tell "flying a desk is a living hell for these guys" to all the families of the victims of the US fighter pilots whose antics led to the cutting down of a cable car that KILLED people (I am sure they would have opted for desk jobs over death). Admittedly that was due to an immaturity level rather than blood level, but the example stands for the possibilities for pilot (rather than mechanical) error in high risk environments.
Btw, stop romanticising pilots, cosmonauts, astronauts, taichonauts... they all add up to naught next to a commited nurse or doctor.
This black box sounds just like that little gizmo the Borg take from their dead drones before they dispose of the rest of the body.
It would be interresting to get an automated "You are fired"-email to the cellphone when enough vitals are outside of specified parameters. But then again, there are some advantages: You don't have to go through all of the bureaucracy when applying for a life insurance - they are already aware of all the necessary data to make a fair risk judgement.
Add another Trek device to the list of real-world inventions.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Many hospitals already use "telemetry" units, which are just radio transmitters with the old fashioned ekg, pulse, etc leads attached. No recording, just real-time transmission to the nurses' station. The idea is to alert the nurse immediately if a high-risk (cardiac, etc.) patient has a serious problem. This eliminates the uncomfortable leads and adds recording, but the box sounds like a similar size.
The key is to USE it properly. My father-in-law was a patient on an all-telemetry ward a couple of years ago. A fellow patient got fed up with his treatment, took all of the leads and the unit off and WENT HOME. Guess how many hours it took the staff to notice they were getting no vitals at all from this patient?
Ignorance is the root of all evil.
Bluetooth headsets, wearable status monitors...
You know where it's heading.
i've got a similar device, i carry it on with me almost all the time , and'd it's called *iPod*. why the cpod? the C made it very fuffy.... (a word that means not very bad but useless...)
Soon we'll see these things tied to the new cameras that record everything in your life as you wear them.
That way, Santa can just fire up the workstation and download the info to see who's been naughty or nice.
This will also go into the Master Database. Remember when in high school when teachers used to threaten "this will go into your PERMINATE RECORD!" Where is this record at now?
I'm sure all this will get tied together somehow and come back to bite me in the ass...it always does.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Hoarse, masculine voice: Er, sure. Whatever.
Operator: Wonderful. Now we just need to verify your identity.
Hoarse, masculine voice: My pulse is 85 right now. BP 150 over 200. And, yes, I'm already seeing a doctor about it.
Operator: That's just fine. So, you said you wanted this line of credit made out to "Eddie's House of Hot Skin" in San Pedro, right?
Hmmmph. I may have just found a new career direction.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
It seems like a dot com ad. We have this great technology but I cannot find a price or where you can purchase it. Are they looking for VC dollars to make it public?
When I first read the title, I was thinking this would be some kind of egg-shaped thing that I could crawl inside. Then, people could push me out of airplanes or high buildings and I survive.
For nursing home patients:
"(user) needs food."
"(user) needs food BADLY!"
"(user) is about to die!"
Similar item in the form factor of a shirt, links on this page to videos of the shirt:
LifeShirt Demos
An electronic device that confirms that I actually did rm -r -f /home
Perhaps we could even further enhance the system by allowing the symptoms to be transmitted as an email attachment to the doctor. He could then diagnose your illness, and call a prescription in to your pharmacy without ever having to see you. As the technology progressed, we could have the diagnosis made automatically by a computer.
Eventually, you would just take your readings to the pharmacy, put them in a machine, and receive your prescription. Drug interactions, body weight/type, and past conditions could all be factored to obtain an optimal medical diagnosis.
Atanamis
Snake? SNAKE!
That was Payne Stewart's (professional golfer, US Open winner) plane. His plane took off (with six people on board?) from Florida, went silent about thirty minutes after takeoff, and ended up crashing somewhere in South Dakota when it ran out of fuel.
There may be results from the FAA accident investigation - I don't know.
Upon inspection of your CPOD datalogs, the cause of the affliction has been identified as a recurring rapid jerking motion of the lower right arm.
Please refrain from resubmitting your application unless there are other medical factors that would cause said motion to be triggered involuntarily. Until such time, we suggest you get a girlfriend.
.. can track flatulence. I for one would prefer it if some co-workers had to wear these as to warn others to keep a safe distance. BEEP BEEP Fart detected! Fart detected!
... would it be a p-Pod?
The aircraft lost cabin pressure at very high altitude (40,000+ feet?) and all aboard died very quickly (seconds, maybe a minute) from hypoxia (lack of oxygen) loooong before the aircraft ran out of fuel and crashed. At such high altitudes, not even breathing 100% oxygen will keep you alive, unless you're in a pressurized cabin since the O2 will literally boil out of your blood .
(Brian is hired as a pilot and he and Stewie starts the engine, run right into two cows tearing off the wings)
Stewie: "Boy, are you going to get redfaced when they find the black box!"
NTSB report here
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/s674866.htm
PM - Coroner critises NTSB following plane crash
PM - Thursday, 12 September , 2002 00:00:00
Reporter: Ian Townsend
HAMISH ROBERTSON: The West Australian coroner has taken the Australian Transport Safety Bureau to task over the way it investigated a plane crash that killed eight men two years ago.
The men were aboard a plane that left Perth and travelled more than 2,000 kilometres on autopilot, before it crashed in Queensland's remote north west.
The inquest failed to determine exactly why the men died, but the Coroner's recommended a new alarm system for pressurised planes to stop it happening again.
Ian Townsend reports.
IAN TOWNSEND: In September 2000, seven men boarded a Beechcraft Super King Air 200 plane at Perth, charted by mining company, Sons of Gwalia, to take them to the company's gold mine at Leonora in Western Australia.
Half an hour in to the flight, air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane's pilot.
In the eery five hours that followed, the plane flew on autopilot across the Northern Territory before crashing when it ran out of fuel on a remote cattle station in Queensland's gulf country.
In its last hours it was shadowed by several planes trying desperately to make contact with the pilot. But it appears everyone on board was unconscious or dead. The plane crashed with no survivors.
Today the West Australian Coroner, Alistair Hope handed down his final report into the deaths of pilot, Ken Mosedale and the seven passengers.
His findings: that their deaths were an accident but that the causes of death still can't be determined. Mr Hope's report was a scathing attack on the investigators, especially the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.
CORONER'S REPORT: I should stress at the outset that any comments in relation to the performance of the ATSB are made in the context where eight people have unnecessarily lost their lives, such a tragic event in my view requires careful analysis of available evidence and where answers are not forthcoming because of a lack of evidence, an examination should take place as to the way in which evidence has been obtained and possible deficiencies in obtaining evidence identified, which should be corrected in future cases if such tragedies are not to be repeated on a continuing basis.
IAN TOWNSEND: Mr Hope went on to outline what he said where deficiencies of evidence, especially a 12 month delay in getting crucial toxicology tests that could have determined how the men died, if the cabin had depressurised, or if there were toxic fumes.
Mr Hope was particularly critical of the lack of coordination between the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, the Queensland Police and the Civil Aviation Safety Authority.
He also criticised the ATSB in the way it presented its evidence and its failure to take notes when interviewing witnesses, the lack of compassion for grieving relatives by one bureau investigator and the lack of transparency in the relationship between the bureau and the aircraft manufacturers.
And there was also a blast for the ATSB executive director, Kym Bills, who wrote to the coroner during the inquest complaining about criticism of the bureau. The coroner pointed out that it was improper to attempt to influence the future course of the hearing directly.
Mr Hope recommended that in future the ATSB and Civil Aviation Safety Authority and the police coordinate their investigations. He also recommended that an audible warning system for cabin depressuristion be fitted to all pressurised aircraft, and that the Civil Aviation Safety Authority investigator sought a cheaper version of the black box flight recorder for general aviation aircraft.
Other recommendations included that the Australian Transport Safety Bureau review is procedures to ensure that if a similar tragedy happened again that the proper toxicology tests were carried out early to find out whether toxic fumes or cabin depressurisation were to blame.
...does it come in 5 shagadelic colors?
Thank-yah-vury-much. I'll be playing here all week, folks.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
It ain't a black box until it's virtually indestructable.
At that point, it would double as a bulletproof shield.
All joking aside, if you build one of these into police and soldiers' bulletproof vests, you will have a new way to keep men alive out there. (Or, in a post-battle field, find those bodies that are still alive)
The Penguin Producer
Chase 2.0
Is that a supercomputer in your jammies?
OT: I misread it as "Science: A Black Box for People", where I thought that the article was about science being so complex that the average Joe/Jane can't grok how most of our advancements have been achieved. People, in general, regard most technology as black boxes because they have absolutely know clue as to how stuff works. Science might be a black box also because most discoveries are so esoteric that people have no idea what they are, much less how it will benifit their lives. This could be dangerous because rhetoric about science being harmful to society and humanity is easier to understand to the average person and that can lead to a resentment of science to the point where people will demand an outright ban on scientific advancement, which will lead to another dark age.
at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami.
We didn't have cheap solid-state memory, so it wasn't quite as small.
We used a walkman-size recorder.
The speed of the cassette tape was slowed to allow 6 hours of recording and the signal was FM'd.
gewg_
Technically you're correct, but if you're at 40,000 feet and you've lost total cabin pressure for 60 seconds or longer, you're as good as dead anyway.
If you're tripped out by your screensaver, your iBod would alter the screensaver to reflect that and, in turn, trip you out even more which would make your iBod...
fs
I thought they already had that...it's called prison.