Healthwear: Medical Technology Becomes Wearable

Until recently, researchers have had little success in extending healthcare into the home environment, yet there clearly is a huge demand for this service. Americans currently spend $27 billion on healthcare outside the formal medical establishment, which they find difficult, expensive, and painful to access. A dramatic shift in the composition of the US population makes it absolutely necessary to develop such distributed systems. To address these demands, a research group at the MIT Media Lab has been developing healthwear, wearable systems with sensors that can continuously monitor the user's vital signs, motor activity, social interactions, sleep patterns, and other health indicators. The system's software can use the data from these sensors to build a personalized profile of the user's physical performance and nervous system activation throughout the entire day providing a truly personal medical record that could revolutionize healthcare.