AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
By Dale Buss September 20, 2011
Ford and other automakers might be able to help you monitor your heartbeat in the car, check your blood-sugar levels and police the cabin air for pollens. But will you want them to? The leaps and bounds taken by cockpit automotive electronics are rapidly propelling the industry into marvelous new realms of technological possibility not visited since the onset of General Motors’ OnStar and GPS-enabled location services more than a decade ago. And despite the fact that these advances also come with disquieting privacy issues, the expansion of health-monitoring services in the vehicle seems as inevitable as the next electric car. “It could be a watershed moment to think [the car and health monitoring] could be merged,” said Gary Strumolo, global manager of vehicle design and “infotronics” for Ford Research & Innovation.
Ford has become a trailblazer in this area along with a sundry collection of suppliers. “You don’t know what you want until you see it. Look at the iPhone – now people can’t live without it. So we’re hoping that people react well to the notion of health maintenance being addressed in the car.” Already, Ford said, about 78 percent of U.S. consumers are interested in mobile health solutions, citing a survey by Harris Interactive and CTIA-The Wireless Association. Strumolo has some support from independent big thinkers such as Steve Frazee, executive director of the Grand Rapids, Mich., office of Technology Entertainment and Design (TED), the highly watched global group of “ideators” and futurists. “Why do we allow companies to do anything other than make our lives better and then hold them accountable for doing so?” Frazee said. “Ford is looking into these things to be of service in people’s lives. That really makes sense to me.”
How Far Is Too Far?
But in an era of ubiquitous hacking, a growing nanny state, bold corporate information grabs and rising pressures to curb health-care costs, is it far-fetched to fear that linking access to real-time individual medical information with sophisticated vehicle electronics could lead to over-reaches? One day, perhaps, could such a system could pop a message onto an onboard screen reading, “No fast-food drive-through for you today” -- and then have the car refuse to drive into a McDonalds? Another obstacle to progress in this arena may be a growing conviction by federal officials and safety experts that there already are too many new things going on inside an automobile, and American drivers simply can’t handle more potential distractions such as worrying whether their pulse is five beats too fast.
“I’m just putting everyone on notice,” David Strickland, the administrator of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, said earlier this year at an automotive “infotainment” conference in Detroit. “A car is not a ‘mobile device.’ I’m not in the business of helping people tweet better. I’m not in the business of helping people post on Facebook better.” Or maybe Ford and other companies have been deceived by the success of their infotainment forays so far, like Sync, into overestimating how much consumers are looking for them to expand on the connectivity idea. “I’ve read that vehicles are going to be thought of more as a mode of communication than transportation,” said Dave Miller, chief security officer of Covisint, a Detroit-based provider of vehicle-connectivity software and services. “I’m 50 years old and an IT geek, and I think that’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard of in my life.”
Ford’s Advances
Ford has catalyzed this discussion lately by promoting its research and development advances in at least four areas of health information and monitoring that would use its Sync wireless-communications platform – and, as Strumolo put it, could “fundamentally transform” Sync. Least of an extrapolation from currently available technology is Ford’s work with WellDoc, an outfit that uses the internet cloud to help medical patients monitor important data and get information and help using their smart phones and other devices. A Ford system could make regular or sporadic advisories or query the driver about whether he’s taken his meds that day, or question her about what she’s eating and whether she’s getting enough sleep and exercise. “Or it could launch dialogue about keeping your eyes on the road and hands on the wheel,” Strumulo said.
Also, with SDI Health, Ford is partnering to develop location-specific, daily index levels for pollen, asthma, cold and cough and ultraviolet sensitivity. “It queries a database to find out pollen levels, and the car could react by going automatically into an air-recirculation mode,” Strumolo explained. Such technology also could help drivers navigate around pockets of poor air quality. “It could give you the ‘healthiest’ route to your destination. If you live in Los Angeles, that would certainly help.” Ford could deploy the first such application within a year or so, he said.
With Medtronic, Ford has been working on a continuous glucose-monitoring system that would be connected to the car through Bluetooth. It could share glucose levels on demand through Sync, sending an alert to the driver if levels are too low and suggesting that he or she take action, at least in terms of further driving. Parents also could monitor kids in the back seat. “A child may be asleep back there, but he also might be going into a diabetic coma,” Strumulo said. “You could press a button this device to find out. That could create tremendous peace of mind for parents.”
Onto Something
And in the arena likely last to be commercialized, Ford in the United States and Europe is working with WellDoc, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other partners to develop technologies that could monitor heart rates and levels of stress and relaxation and suggest or even prompt action based on its conclusions. One approach wires the car seat to monitor heart metrics, but that could be problematic if a restless driver breaks the connection. Also possible is wireless detection of brain waves and heart rates, perhaps by monitoring the face, “and from the combination of that data, you could get an indication of the ‘work load’ level around the driver and provide a more pleasant environment for them,” said Rainer Vogt, a team leader in environmental science for Ford Research & Advanced Engineering in Europe. “Then maybe you could block telephone calls for a while to help him out.”
Strumulo said that this technology could help round out, inside the vehicle, a holistic environmental monitoring and control system for drivers that already is largely in place when it comes to factors outside the vehicle. With existing radars and other sensors that help the car and the driver react to outside changes and dangers, ranging from raindrops on the windshield to a vehicle in a blind spot, he said, “We would have a system that would be able to tell you not only what’s happening around the car but what the driver is doing in the car itself.” This could allow the vehicle “to intelligently decide what information to give the driver and which should be withheld.” Some developments in the outside world suggest that Ford could be on to something here. Would doctors, patients, insurance companies and government policy makers welcome any help they could get in reining in diabetes, for instance? The number of adults worldwide with the disease has more than doubled in three decades, jumping to an estimated 327 million.
Information Appetite
Meanwhile, about 10,000 American baby boomers turn 65 years old every day, and that generation already has demonstrated a legendary urge not to allow aging or health conditions to slow them down or limit their activities. Apple’s App store now has more than 17,000 health apps, and online sites such as WebMD continue to grow in popularity. “This is a huge industry,” Strumolo said. “People want to take charge of their own health care. There’s a huge untapped desire to get this information, which is why this will resonate.”
Many Americans already are monitored on a mobile basis thanks to “telemedicine.” “There is a significantly growing population that are interacting with health-care products in a mobile environment, like asthmatics checking peak flows, and diabetics checking their blood sugar in a park or at a restaurant,” said Jason Goldberg, CEO of Ideal Life, a Toronto-basede supplier of remote health-monitoring systems. “People are more aware of their chronic conditions and more engaged in the disease process and in health and wellness in the larger context.”
So there may be no more significant territory still deemed “dark” in terms of medical information than the automobile, where most people spend a lot of time. “The big value that [automotive] OEMs could bring is that today, a number of people who are diabetic or who have other medical conditions need to drive cars,” said Vikram Srivats, group head of the Bluetooth business for MindTree Ltd., a Warren, N.J.-based company that provides remote health-monitoring systems. “If someone is at home and something happens to them, at least you have a personal emergency response. But when you’re driving, that becomes tougher. And driving is a significant portion of the day.”
Privacy Questions
There is even a privacy advantage to quickly checking health conditions in the typical isolated environment of a vehicle, Ford executives note. “The car is a natural place,” Strumolo said, “for private, convenient, personal engagement.” And, he added, as far as the resulting data is concerned, “Many types of information wouldn’t be stored, or would be stored and not communicated anywhere.” While “privacy is a concern,” he said, the reality is that individual medical information can be hacked or even accessed legally from a variety of sources these days; an automobile-based system would be just one more.
Sheryl Connelly, Ford’s global trends and futuring manager, believes that car buyers ultimately will welcome the possibilities. “If my cell phone, wrist watch and other portable devices can monitor my health, why not my car?” she said. “The device that does the monitoring is of little consideration as long as it is seamlessly integrated into the way I live my life.” Connelly added that, just as people don’t want to have to juggle multiple cell-phone nodes – a big reason for the success of Sync – “the same logic applies to health-monitoring devices, at home, work and everywhere in between.”
But obviously such ideas represent a huge leap past the commercial state of the art, which has advanced at this point only to assisting in the knowledgeable, efficient delivery of emergency medical services after an accident. General Motors’ OnStar, for instance, offers a service called First Assist that gives callers real-time, step-by-step guidance from a medical professional for things such as CPR. Now Covisint is looking at how systems such as OnStar could access a driver’s medical database to let EMTs know about blood types and allergies; or maybe such vital data could be flashing on the vehicle’s dashboard screen after an airbag is engaged. Already, in a similar but low-tech fashion, a state- and local-level program called Yellow Dot is catching on across the country; it places a yellow sticker in the rear window of a vehicle that alerts emergency-rescue workers to a container in the glove compartment with photographs of the driver and perhaps of likely passengers, medical conditions, prescriptions and other vital information.
Consumer Barriers
If systems posit to move further into health monitoring during regular operation of a car, opined Covisint’s Miller, a good deal of their acceptability would lie in how they work. “If the monitoring is ‘magical’ and the car just ‘knows’ things by osmosis, I could see it having appeal,” he said. “Or if the car had the ability to say, ‘I know you’re having a heart event,’ and be able to slow the car down, and you don’t have to do anything but just sit in the car, that would be good ... But I can see a big subset of the nation saying that, if they have to do anything – even hold their hands on the steering wheel in a specific spot – they won’t do it; it would be a pain in the butt.” And if the idea is to go further, it’s doubtful that Americans would opt for being involuntarily constrained in their daily routes by an overbearing health-care automaton. “Is someone going to buy a car that, in monitoring their blood pressure or heart rate, says, ‘We’re not going to let you start this vehicle because your heart rate is kind of high’?” Miller said. “I don’t think so.”
But here’s where concerns about privacy and control nevertheless bubble up when it comes to individual drivers. Telemedicine executives and others point out that there already are innumerable new ways for patients and healthy people to have vital signs and physiological conditions monitored wirelessly from just about anywhere, and many different places in and outside of the cloud where private medical information resides, and even a variety of ways in which such information could be illegally accessed.
Fleet Apps
“It’s no different than using your laptop with Google’s personal health-record system, or connecting blood-pressure monitors through your computer,” said Miller. “You aren’t worried that Comcast has access to your information because the guy who’s getting your data is with the health-care system. In the same way, it’s not like your information in a car system would go onto Ford.com.” At the same time, insisted Miller, many people with chronic conditions “are very much open to their [medical] information being out there. Their attitude is that the more people who see it, the more likely I can be diagnosed and treated.”
On the other hand, fleet managers already monitor and to some extent control on a unilateral basis the behavior of truck drivers, and so these emerging methods could be very attractive to them. “Our thinking is very much around the professional drivers,” said Jasper zu Putlitz, president of Bosch Healthcare. “For each percent of GDP growth in Europe, we’ll see 2-percent growth in commercial load traffic. That means more congestion and higher stress levels for [truck] drivers, and a lot of pressure on supply chains and logistics. Clearly they could be a safety risk if they work long hours and they have a condition that becomes bigger. That specific market could benefit greatly from driver monitoring in the future.”
Ford’s Connelly believes that individual Americans also “will give up personal information and privacy if it yields tangible benefits on a personal level. And the direct benefits of having pertinent medical information in a just-in-time fashion feel like I am more in control of my environment, better able to make decisions and [to] seek medical attention promptly when needed. There is also the halo effect: If I am getting on in years and having health monitoring in my car, it means that my children and spouse have greater peace of mind when I am behind the wheel. That feels like a very small sacrifice.”
Worried About Dad
Indeed, even if aging car owners may disdain health monitoring in their vehicles, other parties could intervene – including their relatives, and insurance companies. “We see a lot of people who are becoming elderly and want to stay independent, but the younger generation also wants to be better informed about what their parents or other relatives are doing,” zu Putlitz said. “So there might be a market where not the patient himself but maybe the family around him is actually interested in making sure Mom and Dad have such a service.” And auto- and health-insurance companies continue to look for more ways to cut costs by more ubiquitous monitoring and education of their policy holders, which also in turn could lead to offering premium discounts to their healthiest drivers.
With such promising possible markets, other automakers have been taking the field as well. Toyota, for instance, is developing a system that allows monitoring of cardiovascular functions through a driver’s grip of the steering wheel, mainly with the aim of preventing accidents that might be caused by a heart attack or other change in physical condition. As much as 0.3 percent of accidents on U.S. roads could be prompted by sudden illness, according to the federal government’s accident-reporting system, said Brian Lyons, Toyota’s safety and quality communications manager. “Other things we’re looking at might be having a system monitoring eyelids to see if they’ve started to close if someone is falling asleep,” Lyons said.
Bosch may join the automakers in this area in part as a way to combine profitably a long-time but relatively minor corporate interest – health care, including operation of a hospital in Germany and the sale and development of non-automotive mobile health-monitoring equipment -- with its main business of supplying automotive and other industrial parts and systems. “It’s one of the strategic thrusts we’re thinking about,” zu Putlitz said. “It makes a lot of sense for us. The car could become another patient interface in this scenario. Telemedicine in the future should be extremely flexible.”
Dale Buss: is a frequent contributor to AutoObserver.com.
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