Tag Archives: technology

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Developing the hospital bed of the future

Mary_Mallon_(Typhoid_Mary)_in_hospital A European Union-funded project led by Philips Electronics aims to develop a hospital bed that can passively assess a patient’s heart rate, sleep quality, temperature and other criteria without the need to wire up the patient directly. (Via MedGadget.)

According to a BBC story:

The bed would include, not only an electronic weight scale and blood pressure monitor, but also sensors which measure heart rate, breathing rate and body movement while sleeping.

In addition, the patient could wear a vest with woven-in electrodes to provide a full electro-cardiogram reading.

All this information would be analysed on a PDA and the results sent via a telephone line or broadband connection to doctors.

The device, it is claimed, could even provide clues to interrupted sleep by measuring sleep phase patterns.

No word on whether it would have a big monitor over the bed with flashing lights and a cool beeping noises, a la Dr. McCoy’s sick-bay beds on Star Trek.

An interesting caveat from Dr. Nick Robinson of the Royal Society of Medicine’s Telehealth forum:

“We are used to making decisions based on taking a blood pressure reading on an occasional basis – and all the evidence we have for intervening is based on this. The real challenge for this technology is not taking the measurements, but working out what to do with it, so that we are not constantly getting false alarms.”

Can too much information about a patient’s condition actually be a bad thing?

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]medicine,hospitals,technology,Star Trek[/tags]

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Karl Schroeder: technology is legislation

rusty-doors-padlocked Canadian sf author Karl Schroeder brings our attention to an Australian judge who warns that technology has outstripped legislation’s ability to regulate it, and suggests that restrictions of use are best embodied into products themselves:

“The challenges that technology present continue to beat even the best legal minds in the world, Kirby said.

Despite this, lawmakers should attempt to implement checks and balances. Without them, corporations pose an even graver problem for humanity.

“To do nothing is to make a decision to let others go and take technology where they will. There are even more acute questions arising in biotechnology and informatics, such as the hybridization of the human species and other species. Points of no return can be reached,” he said.”

Within this legalese and obfuscation is, essentially, a defence of (and/or advocacy for) DRM-like technologies. Schroeder points out the logic flaws in his reasoning:

“… his idea implies we may have a legal system that operates not according to what’s allowed, but according to what’s possible.  If criminal use of a particular technology is simply not possible, then that’s the same as having a law against that use. 

I think most people would prefer to live in a world where things are possible if not allowed, rather than the nightmare scenario of a world where many things simply can’t be done.

However, Kirby is wrong about one crucial thing.  Laws will not be expressed in their effective form through code; code does and will continue to effectively create law–without reference to the legal system.  Groups like the record companies and the RIAA are finding out this out now.

[snip!]

Technology is legislation, but it can’t be controlled on the level that Kirby is talking about.  Any attempt to do so can only result in Orwellian, and unintentionally hilarious, results (again, the entire current state of the music industry is both).”

Quite so. This will be an ongoing issue until we have people involved in the legal process who actually understand how technologies work. It’s also one of the reasons why Second Life is such a fascinating experiment – because, up until quite recently, it has been arguably the only MMO where code is not law. [Image by K?vanç]

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The game of consequences

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Simulated reality Science fiction is all about asking “what if?”. Singularitarian blogger Melanie Swann has come up with a hefty crop of questions that are as yet largely unasked by the authors who have chosen to write about post-Singularity societies:

“It could be interesting to look at how society redesigns and reorganizes itself in an upload world. Different subgroups may edit their utility functions in different ways. What are the reproduction norms? Do types of gender proliferate? Which memeplexes would arise and predominate? In the Post-Scarcity Economy, what will be societal organizing factors?”

Speculating slightly less far into the future (and, one assumes, with tongue more firmly in cheek), io9 wonders what the pros and cons would be of having a “Google implant” fitted to your brain:

“PRO: Ability to “remember” many details about a person or issue in the middle of a conversation, so that you can marshal facts quickly and check the accuracy of what other people are saying.

CON: The person you’re talking to could much more easily pretend to be somebody they are not by googling information and feigning expertise.”

That last one wouldn’t be so much of a CON as long as I had that ability too … which I would never use for nefarious purposes, naturally. Ahem. [Image by Felipe Venâncio]

But it raises another question – what place will expertise (as defined by memorised knowledge relating to a particular field of interest) have in a world of ubiquitous computing? Think Phil Dick’s “Variable Man”, but displaced into a knowledge economy …

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2008’s most exciting emerging technologies

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fortuneteller As Brian Wang pointed out in the comments to my post about the Technology Review list of 2007’s most exciting technologies, there’s actually a 2008 list. And indeed there is, and here it is:

  1. Modeling Surprise – Computer modelling continues to advance, but can it ever be completely accurate? Probably not.
  2. Probabilistic Chips – Uncertainty may not sound like a good thing in computer chips…but then again, maybe it is.
  3. NanoRadio – Tiny radios built from tiny tubes could improve cell phones, medical diagnostic equipment, and more.
  4. Wireless Power – Wires? We don’ need no steenkin’ wires!
  5. Atomic Magnetometers – Tiny magnetic-field sensors will advance the capabilities of MRIs. 
  6. Offline Web Applications – Computer applications need to take advantage of both the browser and the desktop.
  7. Graphene Transistors – A new form of carbon could help us build faster and more compact processors.
  8. Connectomics – The circuitry of the brain is enormously complicated. But as we untangle it, we’ll learn more about brain development and disease.
  9. Reality Mining – Sort through the data gathered by cellphones, and you can learn a lot about how humans behave and how they interact with each other.
  10. Cellulolytic Enzymes – Biofuels from food? That’s just nuts. Biofuels from cellulose? Now you’re talking.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

[tags]technology,predictions,inventions[/tags]