Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [47]
Her sister, Gwen, has been sharing her moods and sense of well-being with her e-Nurse. The e-Nurse begins asking questions about her diet each day. After a few months, the e-Nurse suggests a link to wheat. Gwen is tested and discovers that she does indeed have a wheat allergy. Going off wheat radically improves her moods and energy levels.
Their father, John, lies down in his bed, and a wireless unit underneath the mattress communicates with his pacemaker, downloading the story of his heart for the day. Almost every month, his medication is slightly adjusted based on pacemaker data. Several times, a trend of his weight combined with heart activity leads to messages from his e-Nurse. The e-Nurse remarks that these episodes seem to follow times the RFID sensor in the fridge has tracked chocolate ice-cream purchases. John has believed he could get away with a “little bit” of his favorite dessert, and is chagrined to learn he cannot.
Our health care has been built on limited, spotty data. It reminds me of the guy building a house mostly by “eyeballing” it, with only rare use of his tape measure, level, or square. Health care with Total Recall is like a house that is built right.
A HEALTHIER WORLD
Tremendous collective benefit will be gained from pooling personal health data. A population’s worth of personal health records will be invaluable in large epidemiological studies.
Location information can be essential in discovering health-related environmental factors. The great breakthrough in understanding cholera in the mid-nineteenth century came from associating it with certain water supplies. Who knows what great strides in epidemiology might be made based on correlations between health and location data? Add into the mix diet, exercise habits, social patterns, and literally hundreds of other dimensions of how people live, and you are assuredly looking at a tool for improving public health in the same league with the greatest modern-health achievements including germ theory, immunization, and antibiotics (not to mention plumbing).
You will soon be seeing massive health studies as never before, but they will no longer be high-maintenance, expensive endeavors Instead, medical scientists will be able to ask simply for ano nymized elements of people’s e-memories. Analyzing such data across thousands or even millions of individuals, they will be able to study correlations of a sort previously confined to speculation.
Some applications won’t be anything like what researchers have thought of as epidemiological study. Google is able to track the spread of the flu by noting when people enter words like flu symptoms, aches, sore throat, cough, and fever into the Google search engine. This simple act multiplied across millions of keyboards provides an early warning system for the spread of the flu about ten days before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has similar information collated from emergency rooms and health departments around the country.
Total Recall promises a revolution in personal and public health.
CHAPTER 6
LEARNING
When Deb Roy’s son was fifteen months old, a video camera in the hallway ceiling documented his first tentative steps.
As the boy starts to totter toward him, Deb asks, “Can you do it?”
The toddler staggers on. Amazed at this new, upright world, he whispers, “Wow.”
Deb watches in rapt attention. Then he, too, says softly, “Wow.”
The Roy family has this wonderful Total Recall moment thanks to their hallway camera, but family memories are really only a