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A Picture of Health
added 3/02/01
by Michael Hawley Technology Review magazine, March 2001
full article is at: http://www.technologyreview.com/magazine/mar01/hawley.asp
As I stepped on the bathroom scale, my life flashed before my eyes. I looked into the mirror and saw a graph, magically overlaid on my reflection. The red line plotting my weight over the last year looked like the Dow Jones average, with little bumps during the Thanksgiving and Christmas eatathons. It was a sobering image.
That system, called NetWeight, is the invention of MIT Media Lab researcher Brad Geilfuss. With it, Brad argued a fundamental thesis: the way to revolutionize medical practice is by connecting our bodies more directly to the medical system. Since most of us are a captive audience for a few minutes a day in the bathroom, he started there. The scale was a networked sensor. The mirror gave you an "inner view": it contained a Silicon Graphics computer and a video projector that overlaid live graphics on your reflection. The weight graph could appear on your beer belly.
Before you run screaming from the littlest room in your house with visions of Big Brother watching your every excretion, let's think this through.
The problem of staying in touch with our health goes far beyond just monitoring flab. For example: there isn't a person on the planet who has seen a simple, cogent picture that traces the health of his or her heart over the last few years. This can have grave consequences.
Americans suffer 1.5 million heart attacks each year, but only about 10 percent of victims receive timely treatment. When you have an attack, you need an injection of an anticoagulant within an hour or two. Wait longer than that and the drug may do more harm than good. Of course, by then it's often moot. The muscle has begun to die. In any event, it's far more expensive to care for someone who has been felled by a heart attack than to nip one in its early stages.
Why do most heart attack victims fail to get treatment in time? The biggest source of delay, it turns out, is that people are disconnected from their bodies. We ignore symptoms. Technology that either exists now or could soon be developed offers a solution. For instance, it should not be too hard to build a wrist-watch for high-risk patients that has the cardiological smarts to detect a heart attack, which is about as subtle as a 7.0 Richter quake. The watch would send the right blip to the right place, summoning medical attention and greatly increasing the chance that the patient gets the right treatment in time. At the least, it might flash an alarm: Four hours to Live! Call this number. - - -
The above is the first 1/3 of the article