New Lungs, iWatch Heart Attack Predictors Are Parts of Human Cyborgization
Surgeons operating on Professor Kevin Warwick at Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary (Hospital) after his operation to place a mirochip in his arm. Surgeons have carried out a ground-breaking operation on a cybernetics professor so that his nervous system can be wired up to a computer. Professor Kevin Warwick, the world’s first cyborg part human, part machine hopes that readings can now be taken from the implant in his arm of electrical impulses coursing through his nerves. These signals, encoding movements like wiggling fingers and feelings like shock and pain, will be transmitted to a computer and recorded for the first time. March 2002.
THIS all sounds good: Apple Wants The iWatch To Predict Heart Attacks. “What if your wristwatch could tell you that you were about to have a heart attack? You’d be able to chew some aspirin to prevent it. You’d be able to call 911 and get the ambulance on the way. You’d be more likely to survive. Perhaps a large portion of the 600,000 people who die of heart disease every year — would not.”
And “for the first time, scientists have created human lungs in a lab — an exciting step forward in regenerative medicine, but an advance that likely won’t help patients for many years.”
Are human being becoming cyborgs?
The cyborgization of people with health issues, of course, is already under way. Diet computers are already in use. Some even weigh food before you eat it, and calculate its calories, fat content, etc. (I don’t use one of those, but I do use a Polar heart rate monitor when I run, so that I can keep track of my heart rate and make sure I’m not slacking off. As far as I know, nobody’s integrated the exercise computer with the diet computer to keep track of both calories consumed and calories burned in one device, but I may have missed it.) Then, of course, there are computerized insulin pumps that take the place of a pancreas by automatically releasing small amounts of insulin — some according to computerized blood sugar models not too terribly different in concept from the blood-gas models used by dive computers. The most sophisticated personal computerized medical devices today are probably the implantable cardioverter defibrillators that monitor heart rhythms and administer a shock if the owner’s heart stops or goes into fibrillation.
Praise be the engineers…
Posted: 18th, February 2014 | In: Technology Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
