The Washington Post has a story today trumpeting what I call Always-On Medical applications while Techdirt pooh-poohs it (because doctors don't e-mail).
Naturally the Posts' hook is that some big companies -- Honeywell and Philips -- are getting into the market. (They never said a word when it was all start-ups.) They seem especially excited about the TV hook-ups which are part of these systems. (Actually, the story in question is actually from The Wall Street Journal (which explains a lot), rescued from behind that paper's paid firewall.)
In fact, what we're looking at here is bloatware aimed not at patients but at insurance companies. Instead of spending $800/day for near-critical care, they trumpet, push the patients out the door with $150/month boxes as big as TV trolleys. Rii-i-i-ight.
Real Always-On medical monitoring can be much, much simpler and much, much smaller. Sensors can be the size of a single chip. They can be embedded in clothing. They can be made for pennies. Their signals can ride on 802.11 networks to a standard PC for analysis and storage. The alerts can ride the cellular network.
And here's the part that no one gets.
AJAX.
By combining software with XML tags on data (Java + XML = AJAX), you greatly minimize the traffic load, you do more of the analysis at-home, and you give the people monitoring back at base a much better view of the resulting data, without taking up a lot of bandwidth.
I have said, and continue to assert, that Always-On medical monitoring can and should be a mass market. As we age, and the conditions our parents left us with becoming increasingly distracting (as well as increasingly threatening) we can use the data sensors bring us ourselves to make quick adjustments (eat a little, take a pill) that can save our lives, or at least avoid an ambulance trip to the hospital.
This is where the big savings are. This is where the big market should be.
Yet the media is nowhere near this story.
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