Slashdot Mirror
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."
Sounds very much like the Medical Mood Ring.
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.
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.
No - I doubt this would be available to the general public for daily use. It sounds like an advanced version of something that has been used for decades as a diagnostic tool for heart arrhythmias - the Holter Monitor. From what I can find, they are about the size of the CPOD, although the Holter Monitor only records heart rate and rhythm information.
I had to wear a Holter Monitor for two days when I was about 12, and it was the size of a toaster and 3x as heavy - and I had to do things so my heart ould go into arrhythmia (ride my bike up a big hill, run up steps, etc...) I would have much rather worn this thing - it looks much less intrusive on daily life events - but Holter Monitors have been greatly improved, as well.
Similar item in the form factor of a shirt, links on this page to videos of the shirt:
LifeShirt Demos
Imagine the US postal cycling team support car having stats in real time on all of the cyclist during the tour de france.
No need to imagine - Team USPS has been using heart rate monitors for years, not to mention being in constant radio contact with their director. All of the other teams do this, too.
On stereophonic equipment, the monaural sound obtained through multiple channels will enhance your listening pleasure.