Close your eyes and tap your heels

How can you tell an extroverted engineer? When he talks to you, he looks at your shoes instead of his own. And now there is a good reason to do it - as new "No place like home" GPS shoes will be pointing to where the person is going. And displaying the progress bar - marking the beginning of the journey with one red light and indicating successful arrival to the place of destination with a green light on the top of the right toes. A red light on the other shoe will  display the correct direction to walk, illuminating on the circle of LEDs like an arrow of the compass. How will the shoes know where to go? By consulting the map uploaded via USB and its own GPS receivers, wirelessly communicating with each other. For future models, you could probably set up WiFi to let your shoes download more information, talk with other people's shoes and modify your route on the go.
So your footware might need its own network access, like agent Maxwell Smart's left shoe with a mobile subscription plan.
The "No place like home" shoes are built around two microcontrollers called Arduinos: A magnet in the right shoe and sensor in the left shoe communicate with each other and with the GPS antenna in the red tag at the back. Clicking the heels starts the GPS. So all you need to do is to close your eyes and tap your heels together. And there will be no need to follow the yellow brick road or say the magic words.

The smart shoes - designed by artist Dominic Wilcox and custom-made by Stamp Shoes might be a bit costly: £1,100 (about $1,750). A bit less sophisticated Aetrex Navistar GPS shoes developed for sufferers of Altzheimer's disease and dementia cost $299.99, and come with two monthly subscription plans - a basic 30 minute tracking plan, which reports every 30 minutes ($34.99) and for an additional $5 per month a premier 10 minute tracking plan. Nike was offering their own GPS footware too, for fitness enthusiasts, but decided that it's cheaper to use iPhone's location sensor to figure distance and serve as a pedometer.

Yet, sensors in high-tech shoes could be helpful. For example, they could detect if their owner is tired or exhausted. Fatigue Monitoring System (FAMOS, recently developed and tested in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and healthy individuals) continuously measures motions of feet, in addition to electrocardiogram, body-skin temperature and electromyogram. And the system can reliably distinguish the symptoms of fatigue. The shoe sensors could provide a wealth of information about motion and assess such things as the risk of falling. And this information can be combined with data collected through other channels.  Aurametrix, for example, can determine how food, air quality, the weather and various activities affect energy levels and generate suggestions on what to do - at the right time and right place. Systems like Aurametrix could eventually integrate our observations with data coming from smart objects such as shoes and heart monitors, to speed up not only walking but also the understanding of the human body, for a healthier world.

PUBLICATIONS

Yu F, Bilberg A, Stenager E, Rabotti C, Zhang B, & Mischi M (2012). A wireless body measurement system to study fatigue in multiple sclerosis. Physiological measurement, 33 (12), 2033-2048 PMID: 23151461

Marschollek, M., Rehwald, A., Wolf, K., Gietzelt, M., Nemitz, G., zu Schwabedissen, H., & Schulze, M. (2011). Sensors vs. experts - A performance comparison of sensor-based fall risk assessment vs. conventional assessment in a sample of geriatric patients BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 11 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1472-6947-11-48

M-health, or who will take care of me?

What is the real way to reform Health? asks Eric Wahlgren from DailyFinance, and answers 'Wireless Technology'. The coming convergence of wireless communications, social networking and medicine will transform health care agrees The Economist.

Wireless health (also called mobile health, e-health, m-health or telemedicine) will enable your body parts to make phone calls, your shoes or carpet to consult your doctor , your bed to measure your blood sugar and your phone itself to decide on whether your mental health is deteriorating - based on how quickly you answer the phone and recognize the caller.

No more lies on how much you ate or when you took your last pill. If your heart and other organs are not yet monitored by smart devices, your doctor will listen to your lungs over the phone or check how your knees are doing in 3D.

We are shifting to digital medical era starting from the relatively modest devices to keep you healthy and fit, evolving teletracking, technology, M-health sensors, Telemedicine tools and gadgets, Health 2.0 software tools, and algorithms for health data mining.

There is far more than a list of 101 things to do with a mobile phone in healthcare first compiled a year ago - including simple SMS messaging and GPS-based applications such as Medication Reminders (SMS) and Allergy Alert Service For Asthmatics (SMS and GPS), management of Chronic conditions such as Diabetes, hospital based RFID and the use of technologies such as Bluetooth and ZigBee in health and fitness monitoring.

It's time to take health care off the mainframe says Intel's Eric Dishman in his talk on
behavioral markers, vital sign monitoring and aging care delivery:

On M-Health, Wireless Health and Smart Plasters

M-health or mobile health is a recent term for mobile devices supporting medical practice. This term is closely related to Telemedicine (coined in the 1970s) and to another recently introduced term wireless health.

Aurametrix wrote about exciting health gadgets and devices in several last year's blogs (such as Telemedicine: part 1, Telemedicine: part 2, Devices to keep you healthy, Going for the piece of a healthcare pie)

Many companies - large and small -make use of wireless sensors to collect clinically-actionable data for point-of-care. Companies including GE, Cinterion, Cardionet, Heatlhsmart, Digi, RIM, Proteus, E-Device, MedApps, are now working in mobile health area offering products and developing prototypes. Check, for example T+ Medical, Turkcell's Saglik365, Orange's Diabeo, Telstra's My-Glucose, Cardionet's MCOT™, and numerous cell phone applications (as some people say, the Phone will become your doctor) such as Allscripts remote. And there will be many more exciting developments - portable wearable devices scanning brain for signs of depression & stress disorders,

Everyday choices determine your health better than genomics. In addition to exciting gizmos and wearable monitors measuring activity, heart rate, sleep patterns, some companies are working on tiny implantable sensors helping to monitor health and health-related behaviors.
Proteus Biomedical is implanting tiny sensors into pills that send signals translatable into messages - such as "just took lipitor at 6:20pm" - sent in a very safe and private way to a wearable plaster, or a smart-band aide. This smart plaster is also picking up information on health-related measurements such as your heart rate, breathing patterns, activity level, stress, respiration
get sends you reminders. Last September Novartis worked with Proteus on a small 20 patient study to track patients’ compliance with their blood pressure drug regimen. This year the companies will work on sensor technology in organ transplantation.


American tech companies, taking notice of the unmistakable demographic trends, have launched a surge in gudgets for aging population - dubbed the silvertech. Emergency alert services have become a proliferating category in silvertech, along with sensor systems for the home, various kinds of long-distance health monitoring and smart medication dispensers that provide reminders and control dosage. Some dispensers signal a caregiver when a dose isn’t taken or a pharmacy when it’s time for a refill.

GE scientists are developing wearable RFID sensors to detect airborne chemical agents - to alert people to the presence of environmental chemical agents in the air. A novel technology based on resonant antenna structures of RFID sensors coated with various sensing films will recognize specific volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and chemical agents with part-per-billion detection limits. The sensor could also be used to analyze a person’s breath. Simply breathing on the sensor could potentially pick up biomarkers that serve as an early signal to the presence of certain diseases such as diabetes or cancer and metabolic disorders.

Non Invasive Health Monitoring with mHealth

View more documents from Bart Collet.

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• GE's wearable sensors would warn of hazards in the air (timesunion.com)
• Electronic Nose Sniffs out Toxins (nih.gov)
• Study shows how carbon nanotubes can affect lining of the lungs (scienceblog.com)
• Daily Dose: There's BPA in That? (dailywd.womansday.com)
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• The new healthcare: Smart band aids, digital pills, wrist bands promise to track your health (venturebeat.com)
• In Health Care Today, It's Electronic All the Way (nlm.nih.gov)
• mHealth, Alpha Daughters and Healthcare Reform (prweb.com)