Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Wearing Your Medicine
Was your lunch yesterday 400 calories or 500 calories? Whatever the answer is, you probably don't know it. Which is what makes a prototype patch that offers real time data about the wearer's caloric intake--and the number of calories burned in the past 24 hours--such a potentially disruptive technology.
The patch, which was written up a few months ago in the Technology Review, is still being developed. It can't yet give precise measurements--at the moment, it can still only get into about 500 calories of accuracy. But it works as follows:
PhiloMetron won't yet reveal exactly what makes its patch tick, but the company says that it consists of a single chip surrounded by numerous sensors, electrodes, and accelerometers, embedded in a foam adhesive patch. The system, which is designed to be replaced once a week, measures a variety of things (temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, skin conductivity, possibly even the amount of fluid in the body), then throws the data into an algorithm to calculate the number of calories consumed, the number burned, and the net yield. Caloric-intake measurements are accurate only to about 500 calories--about two Snickers candy bars. But PhiloMetron CEO Darrel Drinan says that it is much more accurate in determining net gain or loss and is most useful for measuring trends over the course of a week or a month.
But the founders already plan to use it as a key tool to motivate behavior change:
The calorie monitor...together with a unique algorithm--measure the number of calories eaten, the number of calories burned, and the net gain or loss over a 24-hour period. The patch sends this data via a Bluetooth wireless connection to a dieter's cell phone, where an application tracks the totals and provides support. "You missed your goal for today, but you can make it up tomorrow by taking a 15-minute walk or having a salad for dinner," it might suggest.
Both the concept--the ability to track calories consumed and burned with relative accuracy, assuming it pans out--as well as the integration with mobile technology point to how significant this sort of device could be in motivating behavior change.
But it isn't the only effort to use wearable patches to improve health. Popular Science notes that the National Institutes of Health are developing an experimental skin patch--thus far only tested in mice--that allows for the delivery of medication directly through the skin.
Say a patient's blood pressure is on the rise; wearing such a synthetic skin patch, he or she could rub a topical cream on the patch that stimulates the ANP production, lowering blood pressure more or less on the spot. The same could be done for diabetic patients; rub a blood sugar stimulating topical on the skin patch, and a steady, heightened flow of insulin enters the bloodstream to help regulate sugar levels.
While human trials are still a few years out, the researchers envision the technology making it easier for doctors to administer genes that produce all kinds of expensive and hard-to-manufacture proteins.
What both of these technologies point to are dramatic improvements in the ability to measure, regulate and control the body's processes in real-time. I expect that in the coming years, these two efforts will be early entrants into a far more crowded field.