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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=18895