During our chat with the folks working on the hospital of the future (who are focused on helping hospitals run a lot more smoothly), there was some talk about in-home health monitoring devices (some of which are in the photo below).
The idea of devices like these, at least in part, is to take some of the stress off the medical system by helping people more proactively manage/monitor their health. The only problem with this approach as I see it is that monitoring your health isn’t a particularly fun sounding pursuit. In thinking about devices like these, I wonder if there isn’t an opportunity to get them into the larger culture by offering them up as “life optimization” devices. If healthy people could constantly monitor themselves with the goal of finding opportunities to be more efficient (maybe something could tell you the best time to exercise or the optimal time to eat).
Basically, I think there’s an opportunity to make it feel a lot more like a game and a lot less like a chore. Not quite sure how to make that happen yet, but certainly seems like a worthwhile goal.
Maybe GE or CVS or some entrepreneur (or hey maybe TBG) should make a mint.com like site that easily tracks all your health statistics. We met some super nice people at keas.com who had a similar idea.
If you can’t track it you can’t manage it.
There are several reasons I like self-monitoring devices – one is the sense of empowerment and the ability to take care of yourself, a second is anything that gets me away from the medical profession is good, and the third is that bio-feedback provides data that allows you to change behavior. For example, I found that running with a heart monitor convinced me to run more slowly, because I can run for much longer time periods.
[...] a yelp for hospitals life optimization [...]
[...] track of yourself using the tools around you. This is something that popped into my head after visiting the hospital of the future folks at the Global Research Center. One of the things they’re working on is home monitoring equipment and I wondered how you [...]