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Monitor Your Health 24x7 With the WIN Human Recorder
kkleiner writes "Japanese venture firm WIN Human Recorder Ltd is set to bring a health monitor patch to market that is capable of keeping tabs on all your vitals. The HRS-I is a small (30mm x 30mm x 5mm) lightweight (7g) device that adheres to your chest and relays the data it collects to a computer or mobile phone via wireless connection. While the HRS-I only directly monitors electrocardiograph information, body surface temperature, and movement (via accelerometers), it can connect to sensors for heart rate, brain waves, respiration and many other important health indicators. WIN is selling the HRS-I for around ¥30,000 (~$330) and providing monitoring software for around ¥10,000 (~$110)."
I was thinking "health insurance company's dream."
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
So long as the patient has insurance. The devices would be a hypochondriac's wet dream and worst nightmare all in one.
A shrink once told me that internal organs being shown in childhood Draw-A-Person and House-tree-person test are popularly interpreted as precursors to schizophrenia.
perfect, so it gives you a tumor to monitor...
This is old news, and just a variation on a theme -
As somebody who does this sort of stuff for a living - now they need to get around the IEC-60601 compliance and the FDA before they could introduce it in the USA.
http://www.devicelink.com/mddi/archive/03/09/015.html [devicelink.com]
Something similar is in the works for hospital use:
http://www.soterawireless.com/main/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=55&Itemid=18 [soterawireless.com]
That goes out over WiFi inside a hospital.
Also - Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) is designed for this application and there are a bunch of "health monitors either int the works, or already out there for this:
http://mobihealthnews.com/2577/continua-picks-zigbee-bluetooth-le-for-health-devices-sensors/ [mobihealthnews.com]
Blood Glucose monitors using this technology have been around for a while:
http://www.dexcom.com/default.aspx [dexcom.com]
Now if you want exciting - research into electronic eyes, electronic ears and neural pacemaker for people with epilepsy are kind of interesting. Google them and you will find them.
Got your Borg Implants? :-)
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
Soon: "wear this and we'll give you a discount off your premiums"
Soon after that: "We're jacking up premiums. But don't worry, since many of our customers are wearing 24/7 monitors, they'll cancel out anyway. Don't regulate us!"
Soon after that: "Since almost everyone is willing wear the monitor to avoid paying $texas per month, we're dropping that tiny minority of holdout paranoid privacy-freaks."
The Japanese are probably the single most proactive nation in the world when it comes to the aging of population and proper care of the elderly, and this invention has some very obvious uses in this field. Coupled with a caretaker robot which would remind about medicines, schedule appointments with a doctor and call emergency services as appropriate, this device might actually improve the quality of life of some people considerably. Interestingly, such robots are already being tested in Japan, and they are also designed to relay local news, play logic- and memory-based games and engage in everyday chitchat with the people under their care to delay the onset of dementia and effects of boredom.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
What you would do is take the results to an MD. Lots of tests involve measurements you make yourself at home. I usually bring my doctor a record of blood pressure readings.
But there's a big problem here. This device will be sold to people who are worried about potential problems and think that if they get enough data they can know exactly what their health state is. (There's already a thriving business in "preventive" full body MRIs that cater to such folks.) They might seem like a good idea, if you can afford it, but it's not. Everybody has anomalies in their body, and too much proactive diagnosis can lead to unnecessary procedures. In some cases these procedures are more dangerous than benign neglect.
There are certainly preventive procedures that make sense. (He says hypocritically, as he puts off the colonoscopy he should have had done a year ago.) But medicine is still very much a black art, and the Star Trek model of pointing a magic gadget at somebody and knowing exactly what's going on in their body is still a fantasy — and probably always will be. So gathering tons of data about potential problems you have no reason to suspect is worse than useless.
You realize the insurance companies are making about a hundred bucks a year per subscriber, right?
If you are trying to prove a point, the first step is choosing a neutral source not "politics and culture from a Catholic perspective". Without a valid source you prove nothing. Otherwise I can "prove" that Jews were to blame for 9/11 ( http://encyclopediadramatica.com/JEWS_DID_WTC ) (link is NSFW really), the holocaust didn't happen ( http://www.666ismoney.com/HolocaustAds.html ), oh and the "contrails" you see in the sky are really chemicals ( http://educate-yourself.org/ct/ ).
Whenever some site has an agenda, it usually isn't a valid source.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain. --Friederich Schiller