Tag: monitor

Everyone poops. Cardiologists are counting on it…

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NOT an illustration of the actual device 🙂

❝ Engineers at Rochester Institute of Technology have designed a high-tech toilet seat that effortlessly flushes out data on the state of your cardiovascular system. The tricked-out porcelain throne measures your blood pressure, blood oxygen level, and the volume of blood your heart pumps per beat (stroke volume)—taking readings every time you sit down to catch up on some reading of your own. The engineers, led by David Borkholder, recently published a prototype of the seat in the open-access journal JMIR mHealth and uHealth.

❝ According to the inventors, the seat’s daily data dump could make patients and their doctors privy (har!) to early warning signs of heart failure, potentially helping to prevent further deterioration and avoid costly hospital stays. Moreover, the seat could ease in-home monitoring for heart patients, who often strain to consistently track their tickers with other, non-toilet-based monitors.

Makes great sense to me…if I had any sort of heart concerns. Apple’s HealthKit built into my iPhone made it a piece of cake for me to finally get round to integrating nutrition and exercise with other apps…lose weight, keep it off and get in better shape than a significant chunk of my [old geezer] age group.

Tim the robot — monitoring the Large Hadron Collider

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❝ Hundreds of feet below the French-Swiss border lays the Large Hadron Collider. The 17 miles of strange tunnels accelerate particles at close to the speed of light before smashing them together to see what happens.

That’s an oversimplification of a complicated process, one where a lot can go wrong. Someone has to monitor the miles of concrete, plastic, steel, and glass below the earth to avoid disaster and keep science moving. Someone does, someone called … TIM.

Does watching TV kill you or just an indicator for a sedentary life?

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QPR fans don’t even get to jump up and celebrate often

People who spend more than 5 hours a day watching television appear to be at an increased risk of suffering fatal pulmonary embolism…

In a study that included more than 86,000 people in Japan who were followed for about 20 years, the risk of pulmonary embolism was 6.49 times higher for people who spent 5 hours or more in front of the tube compared with people who watched TV less than 2.5 hours a day…

In reporting his findings…at the annual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology, Toru Shirakawa said that the greatest risk was observed in people ages 40-59. In the overall population of 40-79 years, however, the risk still was 2.36 times greater for people watching TV for 5 hours or more…

Shirakawa told MedPage Today that people who watch a lot of television fall into the same category as the so-called ‘economy class syndrome’ in which people on long-haul flights who do not move around are at risk of clotting.

“The association between prolonged sitting and pulmonary embolism was first reported among air raid shelter users in London during World War II,” said Shirakawa. “Nowadays, a long haul flight in an economy class seat is a well known cause of pulmonary embolism that is called ‘economy class syndrome’.”

His study was the first attempt to prospectively assess a possible association between prolonged television watching and fatal pulmonary embolism…

Christi Deaton, PhD, RN…Professor of Clinical Nursing at the University of Cambridge, England, agreed that common methods of preventing clotting on airplanes – getting up frequently, keeping hydrated – would apply to people who watch a lot of television.

“That kind of immobility –watching television for long hours – is dangerous,” she told MedPage Today. “It is very consistent with data relating to airplane flights or just our sedentary lifestyles. We need to move around more.”

I agree. You should get up once in a while for another beer. Or a piece of cheese.

Tracking school truants by GPS

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Status symbol?

Frustrated by students habitually skipping class, police and school officials in Anaheim are turning to GPS tracking to ensure they come to class.

The Anaheim Union High School District is the first in California to test Global Positioning System technology as part of a six-week pilot program that began last week, officials said.

Seventh- and eighth-graders with four unexcused absences or more this school year are assigned to carry a handheld GPS device, about the size of a cell phone.

Each morning on schooldays, they get an automated phone call reminding them that they need to get to school on time.

Then, five times a day, they are required to enter a code that tracks their locations – as they leave for school, when they arrive at school, at lunchtime, when they leave school and at 8 p.m.

The students are also assigned an adult coach who calls them at least three times a week to see how they are doing and help them find effective ways to make sure they get to class on time.

Students and their parents volunteer for the monitoring as a way to avoid continuation school or prosecution with a potential stay in juvenile hall…

The program is paid for by a state grant. Students who routinely skip school are prime candidates to join gangs, police say.

Local school administrators say they are thrilled by the concept.

Parents will be responsible for paying for lost devices. But Miller said that rarely happens. They are tracking devices and typically can be found immediately.

RTFA. More pros than cons. Might be easier if the government just started chipping everyone at birth, right? [Only a modicum of irony there]

The saddest excuse was from parents who thought that letting their kid skip school wasn’t a crime. It is.

Catch thieves from your couch and win cash

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Just think – this could be your living room

Anyone who owns a laptop computer can now fight crime from the safety of their home and win cash prizes for catching thieves red-handed, under a new British monitoring scheme that went live this week.

The service works by employing an army of registered armchair snoopers who watch hours of CCTV footage from cameras in stores and high street venues across the country.

Viewers can win up to 1,000 pounds in cash a month from Devon-based firm Internet Eyes, which distributes the streaming footage, when offenders are caught in the act…

Participants, who pay a fee to subscribe, press an “alert” button which relays an instant text message notifying a shop keeper of suspicious behavior. The SMS is followed up with a photographic image of the potential crime…

“The problem with CCTV is that while cameras are practically everywhere, there’s hardly anyone watching them in real time,” Tony Morgan said. “Most people know this, so CCTV is no longer the deterrent it used to be, and crime is rising…”

The government’s Information Commissioner’s Office says the firm is being made to comply with data protection laws and has also insisted on background checks on viewers employed by the site…

The director of…Big Brother Watch said it was a worrying development akin to “pimping out” CCTV images to amateur bounty hunters and should be switched off…

“Whatever one thinks of our surveillance culture, we can all agree that the technology is better off in the hands of trained, accountable professionals rather than voyeurs.”

Since I live in a part of the world that offers reality TV shows to bounty hunters, I think I’d fit in just fine.

The article says nothing about turning away voyeurs in New Mexico, USA.

Portsmouth gets ‘crime-detecting’ CCTV

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Anti-social behaviour has become a familiar activity in some towns and cities across the UK. Now there’s a new weapon in the fight against it called Smart CCTV.

Portsmouth City Council is the first, and so far only, local authority in the UK to try out the new system.

It’s a computer programme that has been integrated into the city’s existing network of 152 cameras and has been programmed to spot unusual behaviour in places and at times when it’s not expected.

Ray Stead runs the CCTV operation for Portsmouth City Council. He said: “With the total number of CCTV cameras that we have, 152, the operators cannot see all of those cameras or monitor them live. “So this software programme will actually help the operators become more effective.”

The Smart CCTV technology is on trial in Portsmouth but if it proves successful, other UK cities could set up similar systems.

C’mon, we’re still lacking RFID tags, folks. Tag everyone. Be certain we’re all tucked in at night.

Just leave the government alone to steal whatever they like.