Increasing access & quality of healthcare

Description

The opacity of our relationship with our physical selves is particularly frustrating given that our bodies are constantly signaling their status beneath the threshold of awareness, beyond our ability to control them. In every moment of our lives, the rhythm of the heartbeat, the chemistry of the blood, even the electrical conductivity of the skin are changing in response to evolving physical, situational, and emotional environment.

If you were somehow able to capture and interpret these signals, though, all manner of good could come from it. Bacterial and viral infections could be detected and treated, as might nutritional shortfalls or imbalances. Doctors could easily verify their patients' compliance with a prescribed regimen of pharmaceutical treatment or prophylaxis; a wide variety of otherwise dangerous conditions, caught early enough, might yield to timely intervention.

The information is there; all that remains is to collect it. Ideally, this means getting a data-gathering device that does not call undue attention to itself into intimate proximity with the body, over reasonably long stretches of time. A Pittsburgh-based startup called BodyMedia has done just that, designing a suite of soft sensors that operate at the body's surface.

Their SenseWear Patch prototype resembles a sexy, high-tech Band-Aid. Peel the paper off its adhesive backing and seat it on your arm, and its sensors detect the radiant heat of a living organism, switching it on. Once activated, the unit undertakes the production of what BodyMedia calls a "physiological documentary of your body," a real-time collection of data about heart rate, skin temperature, galvanic skin response, and so on, encrypted and streamed to a base station.

Other networked biosensors operate further away from the body. The current state of the art in such technology has to be regarded as Matsushita Electric's prototype Kenko Toware, an instrumented toilet capable of testing the urine for sugar concentration, as well as registering a user's pulse, blood pressure, and body fat. In what is almost certainly a new frontier for biotelemetry, a user can opt to have this data automatically sent to a doctor via the toilet's built-in Internet connection.

The house itself can assume responsibility for monitoring other health-related conditions, detecting falls and similar injuries, and ensuring that users are both eating properly and taking their prescribed medication on schedule.

Is such functionality of any real value? While nominally useful in the diagnosis of diabetes, urine testing is regarded as a poor second to blood testing. Most other types of urine-based diagnostics are complicated by the necessity of acquiring an uncontaminated "clean catch," Nevertheless, the significance of Kenko Toware is clear: From now on, even your bodily waste will be parsed, its hidden truths deciphered, and its import considered in the context of other available information.

Enablers

• Private Hospitals
• Governments of developed world countries

Inhibitors

• Privacy problems due to limited encryption technology able to support ubiquitous computing

Experts

• BodyMedia: Company that designed a suite of soft sensors that operate at the body's surface

• Kenko Toware: Intelligent Toilet