LoJacking Grandma and “Reality Mining,” or “Daddy, What was Anonymity?”

photo by mrsmartino via flickr

Mark Heftler, a geriatric care manager who is slated to begin study at Seton Hall Law in the Fall, has written an interesting article on RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and its potential usage as a means of  early diagnosis of dementia among the elderly. Researchers at the University of South Florida have developed and tested an RFID technology which assesses the walking patterns of those which it monitors.

By monitoring the movements of the elderly within geriatric facilities, “the researchers hope to be able to diagnose the onset Alzheimer’s in their patients. Sudden veers, long pauses, and a tendency to wander are all indicators of dementia.”

As MIT’s Technology Review notes, “Drugs that are currently available can only slow the progression of related diseases, so the earlier dementia is caught, the better a patient’s treatment will be.”

Technology Review also notes, “In particular, dementia increases the risk of injury caused by a fall… ‘That’s a huge problem for assisted-living facilities,’” said  William Kearns, an assistant professor who researches aging and mental health at USF.

Not Just Grandma

Although one can readily see the positive cost/benefit and quality of life implications of warding off the falls of the elderly, as Frank Pasquale recently noted on both this blog and Concurring Opinions, the proliferation of “personal” electronic data is not without its danger.

The Technology Review article provides a link to another article which points out that RFID technology is also being harnessed to gather social networking information through what is referred to as “reality mining,”

“…a field that Tanzee­m Choudhury pioneered as a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab. Working at Intel after graduation, she created a pager-size sensor pack–loaded with software plus microphones, accelerometers, and other data-gatherin­g devices–to collect and analyze data about human interactions and activity. For instance, by processing verbal utterances, she can identify the most influential people in a social network.

Now an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth, Choudhury is conducting experiments with the sensor-laden iPhone. Within a few years, she says, simple versions of her software could be available for cell phones.”

Health Care, “Common Sense” and a Global Health Blogging Experiment

Common Sense, Indiana.Edu. Lilly Library

Today, Health Reform Watch is participating in a “Global Health Blogging experiment” coordinated by Christine Gorman of Global Health Report. Health Bloggers from around the world will all be converging to discuss a topic: for today, “prevention v. treatment,” and, to some extent-the underlying realities in which this experiment in synchronized dissemination is being conducted as they relate to global health concerns. I thought I’d take a look at the “to some extent.”

Ms. Gorman proposed this idea as a means of assembling something of a critical mass to explore issues regarding “Global Health” and as a means of gauging the mass of that mass. In addition to organizing the assemblage, Ms. Gorman also asked some prescient questions about the nature of the medium and the endeavor itself. It is here that I will focus.

She asks,

Is a social network around global health news starting to emerge organically on the web? What can we do to nurture it? Do economic realities dictate that this will have to be a volunteer led endeavor, at least for a while?

Or, another way of putting that last question: Is news about global health subject to the same market failures that afflict products for global health (e.g. free-market forces alone will not lead to new tuberculosis medications and other drugs that affect mostly the poorest people in the world)?

These are good questions. And as I think about the economic forces and the affect of such upon the dissemination of information, I find myself thinking that even with the emergence of a somewhat new journalistic paradigm–the blog– the dissemination of information is still largely governed by the older rule: zero sum. And this goes for time and money–as well as focus.

In many ways the blog is merely the modern progeny of its paper ancestor-the pamphlet, a time honored medium purveyed by amateur and psuedo-professional journalists and would be statesmen with some design on shaping policy and the contours of their fellow citizens’ minds. But it is perhaps important to remember that Thomas Paine’s revolutionary Common Sense, perhaps the most famous and influential American pamphlet of all time, was sold for a price-and it sold very well (it should be noted though that Paine donated his royalties to George Washington’s Continental Army for the procurement of mittens). It did not hurt sales that the first printing appeared at a time when King George had just denounced the Colonies to Parliament. Common Sense was of the moment; “Global Health” is not. Read more