Impacts for medicine of global monitoring

In his 1998 Turing Award speech, Jim Gray described a number of research goals including those of building what he referred to as a Personal Memex and a World Memex. The Personal Memex is a system for recording everything one saw, heard, or read, while the World Memex is a system to contain all professionally produced information. In this paper we discuss the consequences to medicine of an additional type of monitoring, that of movement and position via GPS devices. The paper argues that such devices will be incorporated into hand-helds, telephones, and wristwatches, and that a World Memex will (with appropriate permissions) monitor and record all personal movement. The motivation for such a development is the many uses to which the system can be put. The paper restricts itself to discussing those uses that apply to physical safety and medical research studies. Examples relating to safety include the detection of, and notification of emergency authorities about, accidents involving unusual motion, such as occur e.g. in car accidents or when people fall off ladders. Examples of medical research studies include those that involve the effects of exercise, or exposure to different environmental conditions. Precise quantitative statistics can be gathered, providing answers to such questions as what the optimum amounts of exercise are for various health-related conditions. The paper discusses these among other such applications.