Personalized Medicine is Right Around the Corner
Later this year, a Boston-based company called MC10 will offer the first of several “stretchable electronics” products that can be put on things like shirts and shoes, worn as temporary tattoos or installed in the body. These will be capable of measuring not just heart rate, the company says, but brain activity, body temperature and hydration levels. Another company, called Proteus, will begin a pilot program in Britain for a “Digital Health Feedback System” that combines both wearable technologies and microchips the size of a sand grain that ride a pill right through you. Powered by your stomach fluids, it emits a signal picked up by an external sensor, capturing vital data. Another firm, Sano Intelligence, is looking at micro needle sensors on skin patches as a way of deriving continuous information about the bloodstream.
Source: NYT. More on this in future posts.
The newsletter Access to Energy had an article some years ago about using mass spectrometry to catalog the relationship of bodily fluids to disease. It suggested that using mass spectrometry in volume would lower the cost. Moreover, it could be used to generate a database of metrics to identify disease and conditions, such that a trip to the doctor could become obsolete.
This sort of medicine always gives me dystopic visions.
Personalized medicine is the opposite of Obama Care.
Innovation in healthcare. The new technology will undoubtedly lead to some improvement in care by at a cost. But perhaps it can be leveraged into better preventative care?
No thanks, I prefer my privacy.
I have to agree with Alex. Why would I want somebody being able to (have the capability to) monitor me at all times?
Sounds good to me! and sophisticated….and genious….and technologically advanced…did I mention genious? Also scary though.
Personal medicine is here. Diabetes control is commonly measured by HbA1c results. Genetic variants in hemoglobin can cause this measure to be off by 50 percent.
Without personalization, some people can do everything their physicians tell them, have HbA1c within recommended limits, and still be hypo or hyperglycemic.