Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [19]
If you were somehow able to capture and interpret these signals, though, all manner of good could come from it. Bacterial and viral infections could be detected and treated, as might nutritional shortfalls or imbalances. Doctors could easily verify their patients' compliance with a prescribed regimen of pharmaceutical treatment or prophylaxis; a wide variety of otherwise dangerous conditions, caught early enough, might yield to timely intervention.
The information is there; all that remains is to collect it. Ideally, this means getting a data-gathering device that does not call undue attention to itself into intimate proximity with the body, over reasonably long stretches of time. A Pittsburgh-based startup called BodyMedia has done just that, designing a suite of soft sensors that operate at the body's surface.
Their SenseWear Patch prototype resembles a sexy, high-tech Band-Aid. Peel the paper off its adhesive backing and seat it on your arm, and its sensors detect the radiant heat of a living organism, switching it on. Once activated, the unit undertakes the production of what BodyMedia calls a "physiological documentary of your body," a real-time collection of data about heart rate, skin temperature, galvanic skin response, and so on, encrypted and streamed to a base station.
Other networked biosensors operate further away from the body. The current state of the art in such technology has to be regarded as Matsushita Electric's prototype Kenko Toware, an instrumented toilet capable of testing the urine for sugar concentration, as well as registering a user's pulse, blood pressure, and body fat. In what is almost certainly a new frontier for biotelemetry, a user can opt to have this data automatically sent to a doctor via the toilet's built-in Internet connection.*
* One can only hope that such communications would be heavily encrypted.
Is such functionality of any real value? While nominally useful in the diagnosis of diabetes, urine testing is regarded as a poor second to blood testing. Most other types of urine-based diagnostics are complicated by the necessity of acquiring an uncontaminated "clean catch," Nevertheless, the significance of Kenko Toware is clear: From now on, even your bodily waste will be parsed, its hidden truths deciphered, and its import considered in the context of other available information.
What of that unfolding just the other side of the skin? Without leaving the scale of the body, we encounter a whole range of technical interventions less concerned with the body as process or oracle than with its possibilities as a convenient platform—one that follows us everywhere we go. These have generally been subsumed under the rubric of "wearable computing."
Early experiments in wearability focused on the needs of highly mobile workers—primarily couriers, logistics personnel, law enforcement officers, and other first responders—whose jobs relied on timely access to situational information yet required that they keep their hands free for other tasks. A series of successful academic studies in the 1980s and 1990s, including those at the MIT Media Lab, ETH ZÜrich, and the Universities of Bristol and Oregon, demonstrated that deploying informatic systems on the body was at least technically feasible.
They were less convincing in establishing that anything of the sort would ever be acceptable in daily life. Researchers sprouting head-up "augmented reality" reticules, the lumpy protuberances of prototype "personal servers," and the broadband cabling to tie it all together may have proven that the concept of wearable computing was valid, but they invariably looked like extras from low-budget cyberpunk films—or refugees from Fetish Night at the anime festival.