If you want to live forever you better start figuring out how your body is doing today. A&D Medical, a San Jose based company, and their Life Source products should allow anyone with a pulse to monitor their health via wireless connections. Their combo kit, which monitors activity, weight, and blood pressure, is now available for under $200 at Amazon! This puts the most basic indicators of health at almost anyone’s disposal.
Those indicators will be transmitted via wireless connection to be stored and analyzed online. Using software form Life Source, you just log on, and watch how the little graphs change from day to day. There’s even a way for you to share your information with others so that an elderly patient can be observed by their caretakers, or so that weight loss buddies can encourage one another. After all, living forever would be boring if you did it by yourself.
Life Source has a whole host of monitors they sell, and the combo kit has three: a scale, a blood pressure cuff, and a pedometer/motion sensor for determining your daily activity. Other monitors can be cheaper, and some even fit these functions on a single watch. However, Life Source provides a USB wireless connector, allowing your monitors to automatically update online records and keep track of how your doing no matter where you go. That’s pretty cool.
We’ve seen similar approaches to health monitoring before, so none of this is exactly new. There are toilets that analyze blood pressure, and er…fluids. Body Trace also has a scale that will track your weight and send it for online recording/analysis. Toumaz has a high tech networking system that will interface with monitors in homes as well as hospitals. But Life Source is unique in that their system is an all-encompassing package.
Of course, by trying to hit it all, they’ve opened themselves up for some misses. Life Source’s online software (the Wellness Connected application) has the typical problems with allowing multiple instances of the same device on the same profile. Or even handling multiple profiles on the same device. Life Source does allow you to opt into using ActiHealth from Massachusetts based Fit Sense, but you can’t use both Wellness Connected and ActiHealth at the same time.
Whether you use Life Source, or some other monitoring system, knowing more about your health will help you maintain it. As the world continues to age, wellness systems will become more common, and tracking health information more important. I’m interested to see if the US trend of obesity encourages the sell of monitors. Americans might really be encouraged by tracking their fitness. After all, GI Joe said it best: knowing is half the battle.
