The newest has a name straight out of an Indiana Jones flick: Amulet. Once built, it should look just like a wristwatch?and will hopefully be just as easy to use.
Amulet is the brainchild of postdoctoral researcher Jacob Sorber and his team at the Institute for Security, Technology and Society at Dartmouth College. The new tracker doesn't monitor vital signs itself but rather communicates wirelessly with other devices, such as scales, insulin pumps, or blood pressure cuffs. For instance, Sorber says, the Amulet might vibrate to let a diabetic know her blood sugar is dropping if it gets a signal from the pump. Patients can "check in" to certain devices to log their health information or even send it to a doctor.
"The applications we're envisioning are as automated as possible," Sorber says. "We want it [medical aid] to happen directly and automatically."
This is good news for mobile health in general. There's already a slew of apps to help you monitor your health, but most are used to help with watching weight or getting in shape. Because Amulet is so closely tied to its designated user, it could be used to help manage chronic diseases like diabetes or complications due to a stroke. Ideally, Amulet will even alert a user if he shows signs of distress.
Sorber says his device is intended to solve another big problem with monitoring health via smartphone: "They're not as tightly coupled to the person as they should be." That is, smartphones have an annoying habit of disappearing or getting stolen; they're simply not secure enough to house personal health and wellness information.
Sorber's team modeled the device's design after a watch so a person would have it around her wrist nearly all the time. As an added layer of protection, Amulet will authenticate its user by tracking the unique electrical markers put out by the muscles in the wrist, Sorber says.
When a user first starts wearing Amulet, the device will gauge these pulses by emitting a low-frequency pulse of its own to develop a signature that defines you and only you. Sorber says that even though some of these electrical outputs change depending on diet, stress, and other factors, in their 50-person study the scientists found a few signals that remained stable enough to use to authenticate each Amulet's exclusive user. The tracker will shut down if someone else tries to wear or access it.
Of course, all this automation comes with a price (both medically and monetarily). Bluetooth and wireless-enabled medical devices aren't cheap, and Amulet might require specific kinds of hardware. If communication between Amulet and the insulin pump it controls, for example, breaks down, it could spell disaster for the patient. A malfunction that releases high doses of insulin into the bloodstream could be a matter of life and death. But Sorber and his colleagues say that those are questions that will be answered before Amulet leaves the research phase.
"Things like software bugs when you have actuators without a human in the loop could go very wrong," Sorber says. "One thing we're hoping in the course of this project is to get some stronger safety guarantees than any product out there today."
By effectively taking the smartphone out of the equation, Sorber hopes that many of the worrisome viruses popping up in cell phones recently won't be a factor with Amulet. To make the information filtered through the tracker itself secure, the researchers plan to use data encryption and a possible fail-safe to get user approval before any adjustment the medical actuator chooses goes into effect, Sorber says. "Hopefully, we can get a guarantee that this thing won't kill you."
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