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Biotech Input Devices Medicine Science

Monitor Your Health 24x7 With the WIN Human Recorder 66

Posted by timothy from the paranoia-count-high dept.
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)."
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Monitor Your Health 24x7 With the WIN Human Recorder More

Monitor Your Health 24x7 With the WIN Human Recorder

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  • can anyone say advertiser's dream? So now they can tell what you like by heart rate, skin temp and brain waves.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by base3 ( 539820 )
      I was thinking "health insurance company's dream."

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Ethanol-fueled ( 1125189 ) *
        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.

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by BrokenHalo ( 565198 )
          a hypochondriac's wet dream and worst nightmare all in one.

          ...or a valetudinarian's vademecum. ;-)

          [A virtual beer to whoever spots the literary reference - Google probably won't find it.]

        • Choices, choices ... to mod you up, or to comment?

          SlashDot doesn't have a "most disturbing image I've had all day" moderation option, so I'll comment instead.
          Um, comment above ^^^^

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jmv ( 93421 )

        I was thinking "health insurance company's dream."

        In the short term possibly, but not necessarily in the long term. Insurance is about risk and probabilities. If you know the outcome in advance, you don't need insurance.

      • Re:hmmm targeted advertising (Score:5, Insightful)

        by dnwq ( 910646 ) on Thursday January 28, 2010 @10:12PM (#30944864)
        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."

      • On the other hand, I was thinking "Dead man's switch". Not that I have any use for one, but it would still be damn cool to keep around.

      • I was thinking "health insurance company's dream."

        I was thinking signal hack to see if your pickuplines have positive effect by certain bodyques, with an Android app to process it and show a realtime "fail/success" meter, upload statistics to a central server (ofcourse with target foto and the type of person failing) so you can augment reality, do a facial detection match and pull a list of moves that might work and this target is sensitive to.

        Just record data, let the suckers be shot down and swoon in with

  • Wireless connection... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28, 2010 @09:51PM (#30944718)

    perfect, so it gives you a tumor to monitor...

  • I wonder if this could be used as a sort of cheap way to evaluate problems like sleep apnea. It seems to support most of the read-outs that you'd need to examine. Of course, it doesn't replace a medical evaluation, as interpretation of the results can be tricky. But, it might be a good way for someone who's uninsured to get some data.

    • Depending on the kind of EKG results this can produce, it may become a useful replacement for some of the chest-band EKGs used for 24-hour monitoring. I have a very occasional palpitation that usually only comes about in stressful times, and then only two or three times a day. It's very unpredictable, and even wearing one of the chest bands wouldn't necessarily catch it. This would be unobtrusive enough to wear for long periods to hopefully catch it.

      Hell, it could even be used for games/challenges, like

    • Cheap Fear (Score:5, Insightful)

      by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Thursday January 28, 2010 @10:19PM (#30944920) Homepage Journal

      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.

      • This device will be sold to people who are worried about potential problems

        I was thinking the device would mainly be sold to geeks who can never have enough data. Though this will also be a detriment to health as we see how much we can screw with them.

        "Those RedBulls kicked in precisely 20minutes after chugged them: look at my heart rate right here at 1:25!"

        "Hey, look at my breathing change as I accelerated at 2:37.32 PM! Tomorrow I'll jump from higher and see what that does!"

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by castoridae ( 453809 )

      There might be all sorts of interesting bio-feedback applications. I was involved with a similar project about ten years ago, and one of our more interesting sessions involved connecting a number of sensors (primarily muscle tension sensors tracking electrical differentials across the skin) to the face of a trombone player who had some nerve damage on one side of his face. He couldn't really feel the "bad" side of his face, but kept adjusting until the readings looked the same as the "good" side, enabling h

  • other medical monitors Now out and coming soon (Score:5, Informative)

    by loose electron ( 699583 ) on Thursday January 28, 2010 @10:04PM (#30944800) Homepage

    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] [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] [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] [mobihealthnews.com]

    Blood Glucose monitors using this technology have been around for a while:

    http://www.dexcom.com/default.aspx [dexcom.com] [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? :-)

    • This is old news, and just a variation on a theme

      Yeah, I immediately thought of the BodyBugg (which has been around for a couple of years at least) when I saw the description. I believe that even has more sensors built in and costs less. I was considering getting one myself for awhile, until I found out that all the processing of the raw sensor data happens on the manufacturer's servers, so you are forced into subscribing to their service.

    • There's also IEEE 802.15.6 [ieee802.org], "a [developing] communication standard optimized for low power devices and operation on, in or around the human body (but not limited to humans) to serve a variety of applications including medical, consumer electronics / personal entertainment ..."

      Companies interested in making on-body patches and plasters for medical applications are quite active in this group.

  • Now, to get a discount on your car insurance, they ask for mileage. Its a nice idea, if you drive less you are less at risk of getting into an accident. Or at least that is the thought.
    It is a small jump to use these devices to "report your mileage" to the health insurance companies for a reduced fee. Mark this comment people, in a few years....

  • ...hopefully wasn't done using the slashdot crowd. Imagine the embarrassment after sending it back for re-engineering 30x over only to discover the test subjects were genuinely immobile with a constant level of activity in front of a workstation for 14 hours a day.

    *despair*

  • WIN? (Score:2, Funny)

    by russlar ( 1122455 )
    Do the obese get their health monitored with the FAIL Human Recorder?

  • Of course it's Japanese (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Enleth ( 947766 ) <enleth@enleth.com> on Thursday January 28, 2010 @10:18PM (#30944916) Homepage

    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.

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I don't think we'll see the rise of the machines, it will be a gradual process.

      I imagine an old stock trader with robots that take him to the bathroom, make his food, dials his calls, etc.

      The trading software basically runs itself after 80 years of him training his AI.

      One day he dies, but the robots don't know that he's dead so they keep shoveling food in his mouth and dumping him in the bathroom, while his software trades stocks and his robots take care of all of his calls.

      Eventually they need
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Been there done that (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This was done 11 years ago but, due to the technology of the time, we used a device a little larger than a modern smart phone that recorded information. It plugged into a base station to transfer data over POTS. Once the base station connected to a medical facility over the telephone, information could be sent in real time from the device. It could do ECG, blood oximetry, heart rate, core body temperature and respiration. The base station could take blood pressure, oral temperature and weight. It all w

  • So, does each of these things want its own IP address? If so, these could accelerate adoption of IPv6.

  • BodyMedia has been the leader in making consumer usable technology to monitor 24x7. Check out www.bodymedia.com for more information. They manufacture GoWear fit, BodyMedia FIT, and the Bodybugg, They are also FDA regulated and have an accuracy of 90% for daily caloric burn and minutes of activity data.

  • Mine would be a continuous alarm tone - who could stand listening to that!

  • I much prefer my FAIL recorder.
  • Big deal. I could already buy a wristwatch that does most of this, for less money.
  • Friend bought a new running-treadmill with this sort of stuff built in. It had to go back twice for unreliable readings. That's what he said. You've guessed it - he's now doing well after heart bypass surgery.
  • They need to double the price, and market it to triathletes. We seem to love having all kinds of data, and a powertap hub is like crack. Once you start getting wattage, you are lost to the world. Imagine what this would do....

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