Hi,
This pisses me off so much.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/07/03/1432250/Microsofts-Health-y-Patent-Appetite
I have have had conversations about the merger of the video game
industry and the health data collection industry so many times. These
ideas are so obvious. Anyone with half a brain can see them coming.
I am going to start brain dumping everything I can think of
to this mailing list as a source for prior art. I will include the
hashtag #priorart in the mail posts for better searching. Please
consider doing the same. The supreme court failed to protect us from
these kind of obvious patents with the recent decision, so we really
have no choice at all here.
Health data from Position aware clothing
Using smart fibers that send electrical signals regarding their
length, and/or shape, I can create clothing, like tshirts that allow
for the constant monitoring of body position. You could use the system
to monitor your own posture, or you could use the system to monitor
how long a patient had been in a position (i.e. to prevent bed sores
etc) or you could use it to find a position that was free from pain.
The system could be hooked up to the internet, or to a local computer
or phone or it could make sounds. All of these interfaces could allow
people to program the clothing to do different things, or to receive
specific feedback about how to position oneself. This feedback could
be used with real-time data to enhance workouts.
There are a thousand different network configurations that this could
use easily. Once you have the data from even a few strands of fabric,
you could use intelligent systems to "guess" other information like
whether the clothing was actually being worn. These guesses could be
easily determined using common AI techniques and no specific
configuration which a human could figure out would be particularly
innovative. Merely filming people in the clothing and matching it to
the data from the fabric would be enough to make extremely accurate
guesses about all kinds of data. With only the knowledge of protocols
like bluetooth, smart fabrics that are available now, and really small
embedded systems, I can easily code all of what I am describing here
right now.
I am not convinced that this is a good idea... only one that some
moron would think to patent it. Hell it probably already has been
patented. If I could read the patent database without being accused of
willful violation, I would go check...
-FT
--
Fred Trotter
http://www.fredtrotter.com
