Biointelligence: the next frontier?

Running & FitNews, Sept-Oct, 2003

Information technology has set its sights on personalized health care, if a variety of new products on the market are any indication. If we are not quite at the level of robosapiens, with wireless Internet connections surgically installed in our brains, a recent conference in Philadelphia known as Tedmed offered other advancements.

Imagine bio-interactive clothing, such as a shirt that monitors your stress level. It already exists. In fact, we are merely a few years away from clothing as a first line of defense: scientists in Japan are currently developing a jacket that will monitor--if not regulate--the wearer's body temperature, heart rate and blood pressure, and then alert emergency medical personnel if one or more factors indicates a medical emergency.

Standard physical exams now find themselves competing with technologies like full body scans and individualized genetic profiles. Since the completion of human genome sequencing, doctors can look at such a profile and provide us with more information than ever before about what medications will and will not be effective for each person for the treatment of hypertension, for example. This approach may seem expensive and impractical today, but so once did the personal computer.

Weight management armbands hit the market this summer that allow you to type in what you've eaten and instantaneously learn how many calories you've burned that day. Such a short leap from behavior to outcome may lead many to better habits. Body awareness is considered to be a major factor in establishing healthy behaviors.

Perhaps it's been too easy for our culture to ignore all we've learned about smoking, inactivity and a host of other problems and help--this time not so different from the kind on the pulldown menu--is at last on the way.

("Robosapiens," Discovery Communications, Premiere June 1, 2003; The New York Times, June 16, 2003; Tedmed, www.tedmed.com)