"Every few decades a brew of technologies creates the possibility for not just a single disruptive innovation, or a few in an industry, but a wave spread across business, work, and daily life.

The next brew is simmering.

What are the ingredients? Some are familiar: wireless, XML, GPS, mobile devices. Others are less well known, or still struggling to get out of the lab. Smart dust, cubic-centimeter sized computers. MEMS, which gives computers the ability to sense and react to their surroundings. IPv6, which will allow everything to have an IP address. RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, which attach data to objects. Flexible LEDs, printed onto plastic sheets and foldable into origami shapes.

Taken individually, these are novelties. Taken together, they promise to create a profound yet extremely simple phenomenon: the collapse of the boundary between the digital and the physical. In the foreseeable future, cyberspace and real space, the worlds of data and things, will merge. Understand the implications of this merger, and you can better understand how individual technologies (and products that use them) will fare in the future.

We're already seeing the beginnings of that breakdown.

Mobile phones show how addictive constant connectivity can be: there's a reason the Finnish call cell phones kanny, an extension of the hand. Wi-fi hot spots and laptops let us enjoy a still-fractured ubiquity, giving a glimpse of an always-on, always-available Web. (As William Gibson said, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. Right now, it has an effective range of about 150 feet.)

RFID, sensors, and smart dust are building intelligence into every manufactured object. GPS has moved from the yachting set to weekend hikers and soccer moms (those little bubbles on the roofs of new cars contain GPS locators).

IPv6, the next-generation Internet protocol, will let stationary objects describe their locations. IPv6-enabled street lamps or traffic signals, for example, could warn utilities when they're about to malfunction; if their Internet addresses were associated with physical locations, they could function as a physical address, letting repairmen pinpoint their locations.

Add it all together, and you get what computer scientists call "the Internet of things." It's a world in which data is part of the world; physical and virtual addresses are associated; things have senses, the ability to communicate, and the capacity to cooperate; and we can create and access information almost anywhere. What happens when computers leave the world, and cyberspace becomes part of it? When we have billions of tiny computers capable of working together? When the Web is experienced not as a separate universe, but an overlay on the world?

We're going to find out." [Red Herring]
9:13:36 PM    

This might soon be possible, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A technology based on radar research intended to detect space missiles for the "Strategic Defense Initiative" has been adapted for breast cancer treatment. It is currently under clinical testing and is showing early successes. Since October 2002, 64 women have received the treatment. By comparison with a control group of other patients, these women "had a 43 percent reduction in the incidence rate of cancer cells found close to the surgical margins."

[Roland Piquepaille]
10:00:04 AM    

Hilary Clinton on the USA health care system. [NY Times]
10:39:41 AM    

Instead of a dozen or so electrodes, the technique uses 224 of them, all woven into a chain mail-like vest worn by the patient. The electrode-based recordings are then combined with computerized X-rays taken at the same time.

Algorithms process the data to map the electrical impulses of the heart as they travel through the muscle, revealing the places where cardiac rhythms go awry.

The technique, called electrocardiographic imaging, provides a close approximation of the electrical measurements obtained when doctors thread catheters through the body to the heart and assess electrical activity there directly.

Yoram Rudy, a professor of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University, has developed the method over 20 years. Using the imaging system, he said, "we have noninvasively reconstructed and located initiation sites of arrhythmic activity in the heart with an accuracy of 10 millimeters or better." Normally, he said, detailed information on such activity could be obtained only by putting electrodes in direct contact with the heart.

[New York Times]
7:51:57 AM    

Via Isabelle Hontebeyrie. MedicTouch LLC, a mobile health device and application company has announced in February the launch of the Pulse Meter mobile health solution.
"The Palm mobile PulseMeter is the first strapless mobile health application that allows the user to monitor their pulse and transmit it wireless, view the results in a high resolution palm screen, save them in an archive and transmit them via the Blue-tooth feature to a web-server. Palm mobile PulseMeter used with a palm-powered device creates a solution for sport enthusiasts, the elderly, outpatients and healthcare providers, with need for any chest bend. Users no longer require an additional device for their basic health monitoring. The Palm serves as the perfect platform for both PDA computing and for monitoring wellness."

7:46:54 AM    

Everything from WiMax to an "Internet of Things"
7:18:19 PM    

17% of internet users in the U.S have logged on using a wireless device according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.The report found those aged between 18-27 are the most likely to have used wireless devices making up 28% of those who have done so.The results in the report are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates between February 3 to March 1, 2004, among a sample of 2,204 adults, 18 and older.
PIP Data Memo: The rise of wireless connectivity and our latest findings

7:16:31 PM    

The next step in telemedicine? Had an interesting discussion a while back with Dean Economou (of CSIRO) as to whether adding additional data will improve clinical outcome. The telemedicine evaluation I am involved in seems (though the data is not yet in) to provide an improvement in quality of care over a plain old telephone, so perhaps 3 D will also? [Via AMIA News Bytes]
8:57:25 PM    

"Keeping a diary of our own health will soon become a way of life, turning decades of secrecy between doctors and patients on its head." Hmm, article could do with a better intro paragraph. Intersting report on consumer informatics. [Via AMIA News Bytes]
8:52:16 PM    

I'm not usually jazzed by EHR projects but came across this via AMIA and was impressed by the patient centric view that will be available. [Via AMIA News Bytes]
8:42:04 PM    

"We are a multidisciplinary team of physicians, nurses, computer scientists, information and media scientists, industrial designers, engineers, and ethnographers, all working towards inventing smart technology and new working environments that help in the treatment and care of patients."

Work being done by this group is one of the best examples I have seen of the use of quantitative and qualitative methods in healthcare research.
8:38:00 PM    

"It is only proper that such a manifesto begin with the story of Doug Engelbart. In the 1960s, Engelbart and his laboratory at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) invented the fundamental building blocks found in all of today's collaborative tools -- everything from the data structures (hypertext) and user interfaces (windowing systems), to applications (groupware) and physical interfaces (the mouse). Engelbart's work was driven by some deceptively simple observations, which he described in his 1962 paper, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework." His thesis was this: Society's problems are scaling at unprecedented rates, so solutions need to scale also. Our very survival depends on our ability to work together more effectively, to get collectively smarter. Computers -- when used properly -- can help us do this." [Via Slashdot]
7:38:31 AM    

Most of us are using computers, but also PDAs and cell phones. And this trend is accelerating in our increasingly networked wireless world. We might use hundreds of computing devices by the end of this decade. Still, we are slaves to our machines. With every new device, we have to learn new commands, languages or interfaces. The Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI), a strategic alliance between the University of Cambridge in the UK and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S., has enough of it and wants to give back control to the users. So it launched its 'Pervasive Computing' initiative with the intention to tackle this challenge. In particular, the group wants to develop new technologies to make easier for us to interact with all these computers. [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]
7:33:49 AM    

"danimlp writes "An article at SearchEngineWatch states that Google and Yahoo have become as almost parts of the operating system, a 'layer' above Linux."
Give the use of search technology to aid point of care decisions then the underlying os is becoming less relevant. [Slashdot]
6:24:10 PM    

Medicare Web Site to Provide Comparative Data on Prescription Medicines. Medicare will soon publish information comparing the prices of most prescription drugs, shining a bright light on some of the biggest secrets in the health care industry. By Robert Pear. [New York Times: Technology]
6:20:41 PM    

Jamais Cascio hypothesizes that current smartmobtech is growing "personal memory assistant"s. Combine increasingly powerful, small, wireless recording units (pictures, video, sound) with a searchable, Tivo-like design. Cascio asks the right question - is this more panoptic, sousveillant, or transparent?

(thanks to Alex Steffen)

9:38:45 AM    

Computers to be 'oxygen of the future'
By the year 2010, scientists predict we will be immersed in a sea of miniature computers.
Source: Tracey Logan, BBC News, March 31, 2004

Social Networking Stretches its Reach
Social-networking technology is making new connections as small players in the field experiment with ways to integrate it with wireless and collaboration technologies.
Source: Matt Hicks, eWEEK, April 8, 2004


The rush to RFID
With implementation deadlines closing in, companies scramble to revamp business processes.
Source: David L. Margulius, InfoWorld, April 9, 2004


[Smart Mobs]
9:30:26 AM