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Body 2.0 — Continuous Monitoring of the Human Body
Singularity Hub has a story about the development of technology that will some day allow for the constant, real-time monitoring of your medical status, and they take a look at current technological advances to that end. Quoting:
"Did you ever stop to think how silly and also how dangerous it is to live our lives with absolutely no monitoring of our body's medical status? Years from now people will look back and find it unbelievable that heart attacks, strokes, hormone imbalances, sugar levels, and hundreds of other bodily vital signs and malfunctions were not being continuously anticipated and monitored by medical implants. ... The huge amounts of data that would be accumulated from hundreds of thousands of continuously monitored people would be nothing short of a revolution for medical research and analysis. This data could be harvested to understand the minute by minute changes in body chemistry that occur in response to medication, stress, infection, and so on. As an example, the daily fluctuations in hormone levels of hundreds of thousands of individuals could be tracked and charted 24/7 to determine a baseline from which abnormalities and patterns could be extracted. The possibilities are enormous."
"This new technology is sponsored and funded by:
Your friendly health and life insurance company, constantly finding new and innovative ways to make sure we never have to pay you a dime since 1666."
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
I'm not sure the constant worry about the fluctuating read-out would help people.
Besides that's one more system to be abused and used as an excuse to exclude you from something.
..for a pretty long time actually. I dont want it because I'm some kind of hypochondriac, I just think it would be cool to be able to monitor my daily rhythms. After a while you'd get an idea of what a baseline reading for any normal day was,.. and knowing that information would make you better informed about how your eating/drinking/drug use/whatever affects your body. Better yet,.. when you go to see the doctor, he can look back through your prior week or two of diagnostics and it might help him figure out whats wrong. Imagine trying to troubleshoot a computer where you had no Log files or any historical data. Possible? yes. Faster and better fixes when you have historical data?.. absolutely. (and it could help you catch something small before it becomes a bigger problem)
Actually, our bodies provide lots of feedback. It's just that we are never taught how to listen to those signals. It's usually after the injury occurs that we learn to listen on our own. You would be amazed how well many diabetics can tell their sugar level at any given moment. It doesn't take more than a month of measuring to learn that. I know I may sound heretical on a geek board, but I would consider that skill more vital to many people than calculus.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
> "Did you ever stop to think how silly and also how dangerous
> it is to live our lives with absolutely no monitoring of our
> body's medical status?
One thing you find as you get older and start having more tests, particularly if you have a doctor that likes to keep up with the latest research, is that each test you have for a specific parameter will also return results on 8-10 other parameters - that's just the way med labs are set up. And of those 8-10 parameters neither your doctor nor you intended to test at least one will be out-of-limits for your sex/age/weight/height. A little research in the latest medical data (by your doctor) or you (on the Internet) will quickly reveal that having parameter 7 out-of-limit can lead to immediate doom. Or not - the research is inconclusive.
So what do you do now? As I said every time you have a test you are going to come back with at least 1, and maybe more, new things to be concerned about. Should you start some sort of treatment for that out-of-limit condition? What side effects should you accept for treating something that was causing you no problems? What new conditions will be revealed every year when you are tested for the consequences of taking the treatment for the last revealed problem?
I saw in the WSJ about a year ago that the FDA was getting ready to approve 5 new reactive protein tests. Well, the c-reactive-protein test has been of some benefit in diagnosing early-stage heart disease. Maybe. Or maybe it has just increased sales of Lipitor(tm); no one is sure. What about these 5 new proteins? Should we all be tested for them? Why?
sPh
I can imagine a future society where your attitude would be considered a threat to public health and forceful measures to protect US from YOU.
Gosh yes, imagine a world where it's illegal to ride a bike unless you are wearing a proper helmet approved by a government designated regulatory agency, or to drive your car without wearing your seatbelt, or to smoke a cigarette or a joint in the privacy of your own home. Or where you're required by the state to buy overpriced insurance whether you want it or not. Where the state disciplines you for disciplining your kid, where restaurants are forbidden from serving certain tasty yet unhealthy ingredients, where every product and every place of business is clearly labeled concerning the possible risks of cancer. Oh, heaven forfend that this might spiral into such lunacy!
"You are experiencing a heart attack. I have checked your bank balance and credit card limits and you have insufficient funds for full, practical treatment. Do you want me to SMS a) Your wife, or b) Your mother. Watching the following funeral services commercial presentations may entitle you to a 10% discount. Here's some soothing music while you decide and I update your Myspace status and send a Tweet."
AT&ROFLMAO
I'm glad someone in this thread isn't being ridiculous. I would love to be able to have a constant readout of my body's status. While you can determine some things using your own senses, there's nothing like a computer for precisely doing dull, repetitive tasks, like checking your pulse or taking your blood pressure.
/rant.
While there are obvious privacy issues here, new technology doesn't have to always produce net evil results. I would have thought people on a tech board would understand that. If devices like this were built to only report results using a method that's sure to be noticed, and stupid governments don't pass laws mandating the results be given to the government, this would be an incredible tool not only for medical diagnosis, but also for learning to better control your body.
And before anyone starts yapping about how governments are always stupid and will always take your freedom, so we'd be better off not having this tech, I just have to say: grow up. Governments are masses of people, not monolithic freedom vampires, and if you seriously think that you can have no impact on the course of government, you don't deserve the freedoms a lot of people have worked hard and sacrificed for over the years. If you don't like the current state of government (and there's plenty not to like), then get genuinely politically active, instead of just anonymously whining on the internet.
Sorry,
Bobb9000 - raised by the wolves,
Oxford education as phrased by the wolves.
Microsoft Vaccine 2000 is configuring your immune system. This may take a few minutes. If your body stops responding for a long time and there is no brain activity please die. Setup will continue after you are reborn.
I fail to see how monitoring my body automatically and being informed when my lifestyle leads to risk of serious ill health is "constantly try to eliminate every imaginable element of risk".
I put on a wrist strap, forget about it, and then I get a notice every few months that I need more exercise, or I need to cut out saturated fats. Or, I even get a couple of notices daily to tell me to go eat a banana to maintain a blood sugar level that will keep me feeling good.
That sounds pretty damn good to me. Most adults are killed by cancer or heart disease, and most cancer and heart disease are curable if caught early. It sounds to me like a system only an idiot would turn down.
Seriously, if you live the way you're proposing, you would ride your motorcycle helmet-less back & forth to work every day, dine on bacon cheeseburgers and chili cheese fries, and only ever exercise if it was fun. I'm all for your right to live that way, but I refuse to let your snide commentary on people who choose to put a little work into living happy, long lives stand without refutation.
(Note: this commentary is really directed as much at moderators as at the parent. A +5 Insightful comment naturally gets a more visceral reaction than the same comment at 2.)
When the government gives you taxpayer-supported healthcare, the government also has the right to run your life
Not true. I live in a country with publicly funded healthcare. It seems statements such as yours are FUD and rhetoric from the private healthcare industry since it clearly not how things actually work out. Clearly totally private healthcare as implemented in the USA does not work. The advantage of of public healthcare is everybody has access to it, and are get care based on need, not on wealth class or race, which is what inevitably happens with an private insurance based system.
So presumably, you trust big corporates more than a government?
Don't get me wrong though, public healtcare has problems, especially in terms of limited resources in the UK, various EU members, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc. But somehow these nations rank much higher in health standards that the USA.
For-profit health care is beholden to a financial bottom line, not a democratic government mandated to measure performance on care, not revenue. So in private vs public the latter is the lesser of two evils.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
It's infuriating to see the the semi-luddite rantings of the parent post got modded insightful. Makes me wonder why I even read Slashdot anymore.
Clearly the parent poster believes that monitoring devices are for ninnies and the weak. I assume that he follows his logic to it's logical conclusion and
- carefully disables all monitoring and warning devices on all/any vehicles he drives - after all engine check lights are for sissies!
- removes any and all air quality detectors (smoke/carbon monoxide/radon) from his homes (not to mention any security systems)
- if a sysadmin, avoids the use of any and all alterts, alarms, and carefully avoids the instalation of monitoring systems
The fact is that if this was about managing a server farm or a commercial jetliner instead of a person's body there wouldn't be a doubt in anyone's mind that recieving timely accurate information about system health and integrity is a *good* thing.
Ignorance is *not* bliss, and having more information doesn't mean that you necessarily turn into a hypochondriac. It *does* mean you have the knowledge to make responsible, informed choices -- and/or not to.
Pre-emptive monitoring for signs of heart attacks and strokes are no joking matter and detecting these early on mean the difference between mild and serious, life-altering damage or death. But apparently ignorance will be bliss for the parent poster until the "surprise" stroke, adult-onset-diabetes, heart-attack, or too-late cancer diagnosis.
"I see you're trying to compose a child with your wife. Would you like some help?"
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.