What I would like are implantable bio-sensors that people could use to measure as much as possible about their physiology. I would love to have a device that can graph my blood sugar levels through the day, painlessly, or tell me any vitamins that I’m running low on, or warn about chronically elevated blood pressure. There’s work being done on this sort of thing, with quite a lot of funding, so I expect this to become a reality soon, probably starting with soldiers.
Blood sugar can also be measured noninvasively through http://www.orsense.com/Glucose
There no strong reason why their tool shouldn’t be able to measure blood pressure, hemoglobin as well when they would have enough funding.
Vitamins are a bit more complicated as they appear in smaller quantities.
I’m however not sure whether an implantable chip would do a better job at measuring vitamins.
You can’t easily refill chemicals in an implant.
You can only transfer energy wirelessly (or you burn glucose). Energy allows you to run a centrifuge and a laser.
When you use implementable chips you won’t be able to do fMRI on those patients anymore.
What I would like are implantable bio-sensors that people could use to measure as much as possible about their physiology. I would love to have a device that can graph my blood sugar levels through the day, painlessly, or tell me any vitamins that I’m running low on, or warn about chronically elevated blood pressure. There’s work being done on this sort of thing, with quite a lot of funding, so I expect this to become a reality soon, probably starting with soldiers.
By the way, the usual objection to any sort of monitoring implant chip is privacy. A simple solution would be to only transmit information from the implant via short-range infrared signals (PDF), with no radio capability at all.
Blood sugar can also be measured noninvasively through http://www.orsense.com/Glucose There no strong reason why their tool shouldn’t be able to measure blood pressure, hemoglobin as well when they would have enough funding.
Vitamins are a bit more complicated as they appear in smaller quantities. I’m however not sure whether an implantable chip would do a better job at measuring vitamins. You can’t easily refill chemicals in an implant. You can only transfer energy wirelessly (or you burn glucose). Energy allows you to run a centrifuge and a laser.
When you use implementable chips you won’t be able to do fMRI on those patients anymore.