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Microsoft's Health-y Patent Appetite

Posted by Soulskill on from the fighting-a-bsod-irl dept.

theodp writes "This week's USPTO patent application disclosures included a trifecta of scary health-related 'inventions' from Microsoft. For starters, Microsoft envisions seeing Kids' Personal Health Records Fed Into Video Games, where they can be used to 'regulate and/or prescribe an individual's behavior while playing electronic games.' Next up is Centralized Healthcare Data Management, which describes how employees' health habits can be 'monitored, tracked or otherwise discovered' so employers can 'incentivize a user for an act or penalize for an omission to act.' Finally, there's Wearing Health on Your Sleeve, which describes a sort of high-tech Scarlet Letter designed to tip off 'doctors, potential dates, etc.' about your unhealthy behavior by converting information — 'number of visits to the gym, workout activities, frequency of workouts, heart rate readings, blood pressure statistics, food consumption, vitamin intake, etc.' — into a visual form so that others can see the data 'on mechanisms such as a mood ring, watch, badge, on a website etc.'"

11 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. Applications, not issued patents by dtmos · · Score: 4, Informative

    As the submission says, keep in mind that these are patent applications, filed the last week of 2008, not issued patents.

  2. The scary part by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Is that governments will be purchasing and mandating this crap. And lifestyle management will become a preeminent response to the fact when universal healthcare fails to bend the cost curve in the right direction. And all your immoral sloth and twinkie eating will take the blame for the failures of the central planners who will be rewarded for their failure by being given more and more control to crawl up your ass.

    1. Re:The scary part by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      governments will be purchasing and mandating this crap. And lifestyle management will become a preeminent response to the fact when universal healthcare fails to bend the cost curve in the right direction.

      And what makes you think private insurers wouldn't leap at the chance to require the same kind of monitoring and tracking? Insurance companies love segregating people into different risk pools so that they can charge high risk customers more money. The profit motive is very powerful, and insurance companies, like all corporations, are amoral entities. In fact, it would require government regulation to ensure that insurance companies didn't require this sort of thing. So why not expect that there could be government regulation forbidding the government to require it?

      Alternatively, what's so bad about asking people who voluntarily undertake unhealthy habits to pay more for their risk taking? You already pay more for health insurance if you smoke, for example. Why should others subsidize voluntary risk takers? And why shouldn't we give people economic incentives to be healthy?

  3. Bring it on, muggles! by hoggoth · · Score: 3, Funny

    > a sort of high-tech Scarlet Letter designed to tip off 'doctors, potential dates, etc.' about your unhealthy behavior by converting information -- 'number of visits to the gym, workout activities, frequency of workouts, heart rate readings, blood pressure statistics, food consumption, vitamin intake, etc.' -- into a visual form so that others can see the data 'on mechanisms such as a mood ring, watch, badge, on a website etc.'"

    Oh yeah! I say bring it on!
    While most people sweat it out in the gym and deny themselves delicious food, all of us geeks will be proudly displaying our hacked super-health in glaring neon across our bloated bellies.

    --
    - For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat /dev/random (may take some time)
  4. I can see it now... by MoriT · · Score: 5, Funny

    The Blue Screen of Death becomes literal!

  5. Re: STILL CREEPY by lemur3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    To me, the idea that people are thinking of this kind of thing is what this story is about. Not that they might get a patent for it.

  6. employers SHOULD NOT penalize workers for stuff ou by Joe+The+Dragon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    employers SHOULD NOT penalize workers for stuff out side of the job and THIS JUST pushes the health tied to your job BS.

  7. Re:Do You Remember the new MS interface? by lemur3 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I heard that some people can turn off The Kinect.

  8. Privacy, anyone? by SemperUbi · · Score: 5, Insightful
    This violates the spirit of HIPAA in so many ways. Of course, if people give up their privacy rights by voluntarily disclosing their protected health information to some software app, no one will stop them. And insurance companies will be the first to get their claws on it.

    How many people are too stupid to remember that health records are private for a reason?

    1. Re:Privacy, anyone? by ZeroPly · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I doubt Microsoft is concerned with HIPAA, because this has no chance of being implemented in the short term...

      These are just more junk patents from the big corporations; it's unlikely that anyone expects to make any money off this. But IF things change enough and HIPAA is reinterpreted, they're sitting on a gold mine.

      There's a simple solution to this. Charge $5,000/yr for every patent that's being held. If your idea isn't worth that much, then you shouldn't be making the government do paperwork for it.

      --
      Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
    2. Re:Privacy, anyone? by Superdarion · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Are we talking about the same people who lose everything to a divorce because they posted what they thought was harmless information in their facebook?