Dirt Bike Fitness Odyssey: ECGs, Bloodwork and more…
Over breakfast this morning, I was commenting that more capable devices, based on the computer in your pocket (aka: smartphone) were on the horizon, and a few hours later stumbled upon this announcement for a Mobile ECG system.
This device is targeted more at physicians, and so the price point is likely going to be way too high for casual use, but as a “proof of concept” it’s an interesting indicator of what we should expect not too far into the future.
There are already iPhone-based glucometers starting to hit the market, which is a “no-brainer” evolution of these devices for diabetics.
I’m still waiting for the “lab results on a chip” R&D efforts to hit the mainstream, where you just get a drop of blood and put it on a postage size sensor, costing $10 or so, and get instant blood work results back (eg. Cholesterol levels), rather than having to go line up (the lines are always long!) at a lab and have a nurse take the blood, send it out, and wait a few days for a result to be sent to your physician. The results would be cheaper, faster, more convenient and with less chance of error (ie. test tube mixup, wrong test run, etc.).
Once these lab results on a chip arrive then the next step is obvious….provide an interface to a smartphone, where you pop in a disposable sensor, do the test, and then can analyze, track, save, send and otherwise manipulate the data either locally on your pocket computer (smartphone) or through a cloud-based service. And after that? Implantable monitoring chips that test key bloodwork levels on a realtime basis, and wirelessly transmit the results to the phone in your pocket.
There are already services like Inside Tracker that will analyze your bloodwork on the web, and provide customized recommendations for exercise, diet, etc. The issue with these is that you still have to go to a lab for the tests, which is inconvenient and not inexpensive, and so is only attractive to those that have a keen interest in such things and are classic “early adopter” types (like me…stay tuned for more info on Inside Tracker in a few weeks time!). The advent of smartphone-integrated testing devices/chips will make this of more interest to the mainstream, IMO.
The next decade should be a very interesting one, from the perspective of full body function monitoring and how you might be able to use this to optimize your fitness and performance levels.
