X-Message-Number: 18895
Date: Sat,  6 Apr 2002 07:18:27 -0700
Subject: Implantable chip only *without* medical applications; Digital Angel
References:  <>
From:  (Tim Freeman)

From: "Bryan Hall" <>

>This might be eventually used to monitor the vital signs and GPS
>location of people signed up for cryonics.

Monitoring vital signs would be a medical use.  The article you cited
at

   http://wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,51575,00.html

says that the FDA is willing to let people use the chip only for
non-medical uses, unless they go through the same overly burdensome
approval process that Digital Angel balked on.

I looked at the Digital Angel site again.  At
http://www.digitalangel.net/consumer_buy.asp they're soliciting
pre-production orders for their consumer device, which calls for help
if you fall down, if you get too cold or hot, if you wander too far
from home (a problem for children and demented old people), or if you
push the panic button.  $400 after May 1 or $300 now + $30/month.
Needs recharging every 8 hours.  (Yuck.) 

The only ongoing high power requirement I can see here is detecting
wandering too far from home.  It would seem that if you gave that up,
you ought to get a battery life comparable with a digital cell phone
or pager; at least a few days.  Also, you ought to be able to
compromise: increasing the time between position checks ought to
increase the battery life.  If it worked from morning to night without
having to be recharged, it would have much more value to me.

Somehow they have it built where the monitor is the part you have to
recharge frequently, but the watch is the sensor, and the two aren't
connected.  Maybe the radio communication on the watch is purely
passive and the power draw on the monitor happens because it has to be
bright enough to get an intelligible reflected radio signal from the
watch?  Does anyone understand how this is supposed to work?

They said they had a secure web-based system someone could give your pin
to and find out where you are.  They didn't have a URL for it on their
site that I could find, so they clearly aren't up yet.

-- 
Tim Freeman       


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