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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,
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 very much like the Medical Mood Ring.
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?
... 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).
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.
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.]
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"?
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.
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.
WTF, it can't play mp3!!1
NO FAT CHICKS.
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.
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
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"
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 thought Slashdot went Slaschdaut on me for a second, there.
Add another Trek device to the list of real-world inventions.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
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
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
Consider that if you're doing it for medical reasons, the alternative is wires stuck to your head - yeah, it's comfortable. (Mom had a stroke and every couple of weeks she has to be wired up for a day or two)