The wireless future of medicine

And when you put that together with, for example, now an app for the iPhone with your genotype to guide drug therapy ... but, the future -- we can now tell who's going to get Type II diabetes from all the common variants, and that's going to get filled in more with low-frequency variants in the future.

And I'm trying to play possum.

Does anybody know when the stethoscope was invented?

It's like a wireless accelerometer, pedometer.

And what it's trying to do is accelerate this era: to take unmet medical needs, to work and innovate -- and we just appointed the chief engineer, Mehran Mehregany, it was announced on Monday -- then to move up with development, clinical trial validation and then changing medical practice, the most challenging thing of all, requiring attention to reimbursement, healthcare policy, healthcare economics.

Because it not only helps you with quantifying your sleep, but also tells others you're awake.

Eighty percent of Americans have chronic disease, or 80 percent of age greater than 65 have two or more chronic disease, 140 million Americans have one or more chronic disease, and 80 percent of our 1.5, whatever, trillion expenditures are related to chronic disease.

It's the number one source of commerce, and interestingly it dovetails beautifully with over 500 life science companies.

And what it's trying to do is accelerate this era: to take unmet medical needs, to work and innovate -- and we just appointed the chief engineer, Mehran Mehregany, it was announced on Monday -- then to move up with development, clinical trial validation and then changing medical practice, the most challenging thing of all, requiring attention to reimbursement, healthcare policy, healthcare economics.

Because what it does is allow a convergence like we've never had before.

The REM sleep, rapid eye movement, dream state, is in light green; and light is gray, light sleep; and deep sleep, the best restorative sleep, is that dark green.

06:53 "The personal metrics movement goes way beyond diet and exercise. It's about tracking every facet of life, from sleep to mood to pain, 24/7/365."

And so I went to this, and of course I was gratified that it picked up the 42 minutes of exercise, elliptical exercise I did, but then it wants more information.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Asthma: large number, we could detect things like pollen count, air quality, respiratory rate.

Here is an example of an abdominal ultrasound, and also a cardiac echo, which can be sent wireless, and then there's an example of fetal monitoring on your smartphone.

And when you put that together with, for example, now an app for the iPhone with your genotype to guide drug therapy ... but, the future -- we can now tell who's going to get Type II diabetes from all the common variants, and that's going to get filled in more with low-frequency variants in the future.

In the future you're going to be checking all your vital signs, all your vital signs: your heart rhythm, your blood pressure, your oxygen, your temperature, etc.

Gateway could be a smartphone or it could be a dedicated gateway, as today many of these things are dedicated gateways, because they are not so well integrated.

And obesity we already talked about, the ways to get to that.

It's now wired -- or I should say, wireless -- by taking the aggregate of these signals in the hospital, in the intensive care unit, and putting it on a smartphone for physicians.

13:23 There are two things that can really accelerate this whole process.

And this is ability, in real time, to actually take measurements of caloric intake as well as expenditure, through a Band-Aid.

If you're an expectant parent, what about the ability to monitor, continuously, fetal heart rate, or intrauterine contractions, and not having to worry so much that things are fine as the pregnancy, and moving over into the time of delivery?

So, we can change medicine across the continuum of care, across the ages from premies or unborn children to seniors; the pharmaceutical arena changes; the full spectrum of disease -- I hope I've given you a sense of that -- across the globe.

Now, this is an example of another obsolete technology, soon to be buried: the Holter Monitor.

That's the fluid status, fluid status, that's really important if you're monitoring somebody with heart failure.

It's now wired -- or I should say, wireless -- by taking the aggregate of these signals in the hospital, in the intensive care unit, and putting it on a smartphone for physicians.

And a Z.Q. score is adjusted to age, and you want to get as high as you possibly can.

But what I want to get to, the next frontier, very quickly, and why the stethoscope is on its way out, is because we can transcend listening to the valve sounds, and the breath sounds, because now, introduced by G.E. is a handheld ultra-sound.

Depression, there's a great approach to that in mood disorders.

And what it's trying to do is accelerate this era: to take unmet medical needs, to work and innovate -- and we just appointed the chief engineer, Mehran Mehregany, it was announced on Monday -- then to move up with development, clinical trial validation and then changing medical practice, the most challenging thing of all, requiring attention to reimbursement, healthcare policy, healthcare economics.

06:53 "The personal metrics movement goes way beyond diet and exercise. It's about tracking every facet of life, from sleep to mood to pain, 24/7/365."

Below that's the actual heart rate and the trend; to the right of that is a bioconductant.

00:31 So, let me give you some examples of this to kind of make this much more concrete.

And what it's trying to do is accelerate this era: to take unmet medical needs, to work and innovate -- and we just appointed the chief engineer, Mehran Mehregany, it was announced on Monday -- then to move up with development, clinical trial validation and then changing medical practice, the most challenging thing of all, requiring attention to reimbursement, healthcare policy, healthcare economics.

And this Wired Magazine cover article really captured a lot of this; it talked a lot about the Nike shoe and how quickly that's been adopted to monitor exercise physiology and energy expenditure.

So, we can change medicine across the continuum of care, across the ages from premies or unborn children to seniors; the pharmaceutical arena changes; the full spectrum of disease -- I hope I've given you a sense of that -- across the globe.

But what I want to get to, the next frontier, very quickly, and why the stethoscope is on its way out, is because we can transcend listening to the valve sounds, and the breath sounds, because now, introduced by G.E. is a handheld ultra-sound.

And so I went to this, and of course I was gratified that it picked up the 42 minutes of exercise, elliptical exercise I did, but then it wants more information.

16:13 So, I hope I've convinced you of this, of the impact on hospital clinic resources is profound and then the impact on diseases is equally impressive across all these different diseases and more.

Let me just give you specifics about why this is a big movement if you're not aware of it: 1.2 million Americans have gotten a Nike shoe, which is a body-area network that connects the shoe, the sole of the shoe to the iPhone, or an iPod.

The access to smartphones and cell phones today is extraordinary.

14:47 The other big thing, besides having this fantastic institute to catalyze this process is guidance, and that's of course relying on the fact that medicine goes digital.

You put in your height and weight, it calculates BMI, and of course it tells you how many calories you're expending from the exercise, and how many you took in, if you go in and enter all the foods.

It's the number one source of commerce, and interestingly it dovetails beautifully with over 500 life science companies.

And this article from The Economist summed it up beautifully about the opportunities in health across the developing world: "Mobile phones made a bigger difference to the lives of more people, more quickly, than any previous technology."

Now, this is an example of another obsolete technology, soon to be buried: the Holter Monitor.