Participatory Sensing with Cell Phones – New Study to Determine If This Works and How Disruptive It Could Be

I talk quite a bit about medical devices that report data and send text messages here and the need for proper implementation. We have a bit of a Catch 22 situation going on here as the companies that make the devices and software want a return on their investment, with many being backed by Venture Capital and a short life line to revenue. That side of the coin wants the product out there selling, meanwhile, the other side says hey wait a minute, how can humans handle all of this. This is really something that needs balance before devices are thrown at both patients and doctors right and left with the accountability to respond to data generated.

Wireless Monitoring With Medical Devices – There are Many Posts About These at the Medical Quack

There is a similar study ongoing at UCLA for the very same reason. We already complain about just phone calls and some of the resultant rudeness that occurs, so wait until we add on some additional software and data functions. I have seen this already at a retail store when the employee was completely oblivious to me standing there as a customer and was so wrapped up with his device responses that he stood in front of me for over 3 minutes with the priority on the the device and not serving a customer. Remember the US Airline pilots, same stuff if you will, disruption and distraction is at the forefront.

Participatory Sensing – Medical Device Study at UCLA With Reporting Data

The Wireless Community wants to educate you on this topic as well. As I have mentioned so many times and it seems to be ignored in Health IT today, these devices report data that constitutes part of a medical record and data entry is being left in a large part to our devices, literally!

ZigBee Alliance Creates Group to Educate Healthcare Professionals ...

One other item of interest to make note of as well is that many drug companies are working to change the way we take drugs, inhalers, why? With devices such as the Blue Tooth Inhaler we can have a full detailed data trail, think about it as these are on the horizon now and will allot technology to monitor patient compliance with taking their medication. Cambridge Consultants states that drug delivery of the future relies on technology.

The Future of Drug Delivery Lies with Technology – Panel of Experts From Cambridge Consultants

As this article states the first leg is to send messages and see how much disruption we can take and how it makes us feel with the second leg of the study to actually start capturing data with devices, like I have mentioned here numerous times. Again that VC money is time sensitive and they want sales, but we also need balance with proper implementation so we are not “drones” tied to a device disrupting the normal “human” priorities we have for the sake of dollars being made. If nothing else I have said in all these posts that last sentence is one we all need to remember so we don’t end up with a big brother implementation with those with the technology and devices changing our human values for the sake of making immediate dollars. Without proper balance this will happen and we won’t like it one bit. BD

Early next year, 350 or so Penn State students and staff, as well as local retirees and others, will wander around State College, Pa., for three weeks, pausing intermittently to drop their heads down as they tap on smart phones to answer detailed questions about how they feel immediately after nearly every social interaction they have.

The potential for Nittany collisions aside, the tappers will be engaging in a novel $1-million research project designed to paint a rich, nearly real-time picture of how people experience their everyday interactions and maybe teach them how to be happier. Rather than aiming for a random sample to generate tedious trend results or one model that only describes the average behavior of all subjects or subsets of them (how bored I am of people protesting, "Not me!" when told of population results), the researchers plan to use the data to generate 350 models—one for each individual in the study.

So if you're a subject in this study, it'll be the sociological or psychological equivalent to having your genome sequenced. You're going to know the excruciating details of how irrationally you respond to life, minute-by-minute, scenario-by-scenario.

The smart phones will be loaded with software that prompts subjects to regularly describe what happened in an interaction and their perceptions of their general, cardiovascular and gastrointestinal health, as well as whether specific interaction made them feel angry, happy, sad, etc., and whether they perceived the others involved as cold or friendly, dominant or submissive.