Slashdot Mirror
Ready to Test a 'SmartShirt'?
Roland Piquepaille writes "In a very brief article, Health Data Management reports that Sensatex Inc. is looking for beta testers for its SmartShirt system. These fully washable shirts are using nanotechnology to weave a conductive fiber grid into the cotton fabric to monitor your movements or your heart rate and transmitted wirelessly to a central computer. If the tests are successful, these shirts could be used to remotely check old people living alone, but also soldiers in the field or athletes. Read more for additional details and pictures of these 'smart' shirts."
There's too many privacy concerns, so until I feel secure enough in knowing that my private health information is not being sold or even placed into a national database, there's no way in hell I'm using those shirts.
Hey, don't you want to do your part in the war on terrorism? If you don't have anything to hide, then why are you worried?
I was aiming for funny, but the prevalence of this mentality just makes me sad...
Ignore anything I said above, I actually agree with everything you believe - mod accordingly.
I can see it from here:
Soldier #1: Where is the enemy hiding?
Soldier #2: Let me do some packet sniffing.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
If you're being mugged, you probably cant use a cell phone. But with this when a sudden elevated heart rate is detected, you may auto activate GPS and mics/video. Maybe even alert nearby people or police. Good for protecting kids etc.
Thered have to be reliable inputs or signal processing to detect the difference between fright/panic and running around etc.
If the tests are successful, these shirts could be used to remotely check old people living alone, but also soldiers in the field or athletes.
I'm sure that on the battlefield of the future nobody is going to want to wear a shirt that makes them glow like someone who killed one of their teammates in Counter Strike.
>You are aware the shirt you're (presumably) wearing now is constructed of nano-scaled materials, right? They're called "molecules".
Yup and you notice that to make those shirt we use materials that have been known to be harmless to man for centuries, we don't know anything about the new materials, they could be harmless or they could be a new abestos.
>nanotubes are based on buckyballs terrestrially found in smoke
Bah, arsenic in dose low enough is used as a drug, because there are buckyballs in smoke don't mean that the same material used in a different concentration shape wouldn't be dangerous: all the types of abestos are not dangerous after all, but some are.
As for the lung, brain, agreed there are dozen of way a new material (nano or not) could be dangerous for the body, this just means that instead of creating a new desaster like abestos'one, we ought to test new materials on animals before making them widespread not after.