Sunday, December 14, 2008

Twitter for Health

Science Roll has some interesting ideas for using Twitter in health management contexts, including automatic tweets to a doctor if a patient's blood pressure or blood sugar strays from optimal levels.

The post is inspired by a man who's designed a sensor that monitors a pregnant woman's belly (his wife, though presumably the idea would transfer) and automatically generates a tweet whenever the baby kicks. I guess this is cool, although personally I don't know if I'd want to wear a kick-monitor around all the time if I were a pregnant woman. 

But to each its own (call back to my own recent grammar whine, thank you!) 

Still, very interesting thoughts about how we might use these new media to keep physicians updated about their patients.

One can almost imagine, given enough monitoring sensors, a sort of automated background check of one's system functions, with regular updates: "Ten o'clock and all's well!"

Or, "Sound the alarm, blood pressure is rising!"

Which is interesting, and certainly in no way disturbing to contemplate from a privacy standpoint.


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