Now this is a very cool concept. But I don't know about having transmitters permanently under the skin. Since it is a project from a very good institution, I think they are serious.
In the future, your cell phone will diagnose you based on bio-data transmitted from sensors under your skin.
The human body is like a car. Take care of it, and it might even last a lifetime. If it has problems you may have to bring it to the mechanic, your doctor. Once you're there, though, the knocks and pings always seem to disappear, leaving you with a lot of explaining to do. Ideally, for treatment's sake anyway, your physician would follow you around and do an instant examination at the moment a symptom rears its ugly head. That's the idea behind UbiMon, a wireless sensor network of medical-monitoring devices that will eventually be implanted right into the body.
Developed by the UbiCare center based at the Imperial College London, UbiMon stands for Ubiquitous Monitoring Environment for Wearable and Implantable Sensors. In the current prototype system, the patient wears a handful of coin-sized physiological sensors that deliver real-time readings on heart rate, temperature and blood pressure to a PDA or, potentially, a smartphone. If the system detects a serious problem, the patient will be alerted, the data will be delivered directly to his physician via the cellular network, and an ambulance may be called. Even if there's no immediate emergency, the various readings surrounding a flare-up are stored on a central server for the doctor to review later.
"Many symptoms of chronic disease manifest themselves as episodes and those are very difficult to capture," says computer scientist Guang-Zhong Yang, a principal investigator at the UbiCare center. "For example, episodes of arrhythmia (abnormal heartbeat) may be very infrequent. By the time the patient gets back to their doctor, the symptoms are gone."
All of the real-time multi-sensory data is stored on a secure central server. As the patient database grows, the smarter it gets. The analysis of historical data from myriad patients wearing UbiMon systems can reveal early warning signs of danger before the damage is already done.
"Prediction is very poor in general cardiology because they don't have enough data," Yang explains. "Using sensors to gather data across large populations will help physicians identify trends and make better predictions about potentially life-threatening conditions."
Of course, ECG systems that monitor the heartbeat of mobile patients are not new. Patients can wear such a system for weeks and generate a great deal of data for the physician to examine. The trick though, Yang says, is that such systems aren't keeping track of context, the conditions under which the symptoms occur. When it felt like your heart jumped out of your chest, were you sleeping or had you just run down a flight of stairs to catch the postman?
'Traditional monitoring systems may have simple ways for the patient to annotate the readings, but it would be much more accurate if you could measure other physical activities along with the cardiac events," Yang says.
To that end, Yang's UbiCare collaborators at Lancaster University are developing novel machine learning algorithms to provide UbiMon with a bit of brains. These "context-aware" computers (PDF) gather data from myriad sensors, such as accelerometers that monitor motion, and use statistics to deduce what the wearer is doing.
Currently, Yang and his colleagues are testing a basic context-aware UbiMon system equipped with cardiac sensors. In the near future, they hope to conduct a field study with heart patients. Meanwhile, Yang says, the UbiCare group is exploring futuristic sensor designs that could be "worn as rings and earrings" and eventually implanted to monitor myriad medical conditions. The UbiCare researchers and their colleagues from labs around the world will present the state-of-the-art next April at the International Workshop on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks.
While hardware implants sound sci-fi, in-vivo medical devices are already on the market. Pacemakers are the most obvious example, while implanted insulin pumps for diabetics and brain stimulators for epileptics are more recent developments. Building an implantable sensor is a non-trivial challenge though. For one, the devices have to be made from a "biocompatible" material so the body doesn't deem it a foreign object and engage the immune system to fight the intruder. Secondly, wireless implants have the same Achilles' Heel as any other mobile device: battery life.
"You don't want to extract them very often just to change the battery," Yang says.
One way to save energy is to provide the sensors with some local processing power. That way, the power-gulping transmitters only kick on when a sensor detects something odd happening in your innards. Then, the sensor can send a signal through the skin where it can be received by a nearby mobile phone or handheld. Think of it as your own personal area network.
"All of this technology will give patients freedom," Yang says. "Monitoring someone's health in their normal living situation significantly improves their quality of life."
