Great Minds Ponder "Dashboard" for the Human Body

Bijal P. Trivedi
National Geographic Today

July 23, 2003

Richard Saul Wurman would like to take his temperature—and to monitor all his vital signs, like heart and respiration rate and blood pressure—continuously.

Then, if a health problem came up, a signal would flash—rather like the light on a dashboard that says "Check Engine."

"Why do we know more about our cars than our bodies?" asks Wurman. "Why is there no dashboard for the human body?"

"I would like to have in my hand, right now, some little PDA that has my blood pressure, my pulse readings, and all the things about my bloods, my lipids and my schmipids and all those things. Why can't we have that in our hand? The fact is we can."

To satisfy his curiosity, and to explore medicine's frontiers, Wurman organized TEDMED3, a conference last month in Philadelphia.

Wurman is the founder and longtime ringmaster of the celebrated TED conferences in Monterey, California, for leaders in technology, entertainment and design.

TEDMED3—the technology, entertainment, and design of medicine—is the answer to "can't see the forest for the trees" syndrome. It's about bringing together top minds from very different fields to recognize ideas and patterns that aren't always clear from within one's given discipline.

The conference attracted a typical Wurman cross disciplinary crowd of specialists in artificial intelligence and robotics, CEOs, dancers, entrepreneurs, singers and surgeons, along with Nobel Prize laureate Kary Mullis.

"The key is to live better, not necessarily longer," to prevent rather than having to cure, to delay age-related diseases "and to postpone disability until the very end of life," says Dr. Sherwin Nuland, a professor of surgery at the Yale School of Medicine, in New Haven, and author of the best-selling How We Die.

Body Sensors, Armbands, Orbs, and Smart Shirts

One way to help achieve those goals is for people to monitor their health more regularly.

TEDMED3 speakers showed off monitoring devices that, unlike the Star Trek Tricorder diagnostic tool, are on the verge of coming into the marketplace.

For example, the LifeShirt, from VivoMetrics, in Ventura, California, is embedded with sensors that measure breathing, heart rate and physical activity like walking or running, with the capacity to expand to cover blood pressure and blood oxygen level, brain activity and temperature.

The LifeShirt also is machine-washable.

"About 99 percent of our time is spent out of clinics, and yet 99 percent of data is taken when in them," says Paul Kennedy, CEO of VivoMetrics. Thus, Kennedy points out, health care is based on "snapshots" from a doctor's office rather than in a continuous stream from everyday life.

For a practical demonstration, Kennedy gave a LifeShirt to Christina Merrill, one of the tap dancers who kicked off the conference in the morning.

As it happened, Merrill missed her cue and joined the troupe a bit late—while the LifeShirt recorded her reaction.

In his presentation, Kennedy showed a profile of Merrill's LifeShirt-recorded heart rate during the entire sequence: waiting for her cue, realizing suddenly—heart pounding—that she had missed her cue, calculating her point of entry and, exultantly, joining the other dancers.

From the data, "we can see her anxiety and emotional stress," says Kennedy. "It's an actual movie of her physiology, a movie of her life."

Glancible Technology

"Unobtrusive body monitoring will be the microscope for health care," says Astro Teller, computer scientist and CEO of BodyMedia, in Pittsburgh.

Teller sported one of his company's armbands that housed an array of biometric sensors that continuously collect data: heart rate, movement, heat flow, skin temperature and ambient temperature. The armband transmits the data wirelessly to a personal computer.

The diet industry gets the message. Armband wearers could record their daily calorie intake and "beam" energy expenditure data to learn how many calories they had burned.

People want monitoring devices that are "glancible" and as easy to read as clocks or barometers, without having to log onto the Internet for a personal health report, says David Rose, president of Ambient Devices, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Rose's display device is a glowing glass orb. At the beginning of the conference, he attached wireless "footpods" to the shoes of volunteers to count their footsteps.

As the volunteers passed the orbs in the conference lobby, a wireless transmission between footpod and orb would cause each individual's orb to glow red, blue, green or yellow—depending on how active the volunteer had been.

"It is a well known coaching technique that measurement influences what people do," says Rose. "If they can see at a glance that the orb is glowing red, they might be motivated to do a little more walking."

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