Personal Health Monitoring Via a Distributed Phone Processor Network?

Posted by Bob Armstrong on December 20, 2012 1:40 PM EST

It's not every day that you come across someone who is combinining both health monitoring with distributed networking. James Meneghello at Australia's Murdoch University are working on a way to monitor a person's health via a smartphone, while also making use of other smartphones located in proximity to the primary user.  Think of it as health care data processing via a distributed nodal network.

From the article:

A Murdoch University PhD candidate envisions a future in which everyone wears a low-energy sensor to monitor their health – and he’s doing the computing work to make it a reality.

James Meneghello of Murdoch’s School of Information Technology recently returned from three months with DistriNet Research Group at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium working on leading-edge wireless sensor networking.

A lot has been done on using sensors to monitor health, but my work is the first that uses mobile phones collaboratively to detect and alert people to physical conditions like heart attacks," says Murdoch researcher James Meneghello. “Basically, if a person wearing a sensor has a problem with their heart, I want their phone to detect the anomaly and reach out to phones around it, using them to process the information, then pulling it back to warn the person that they’re about to have a heart attack."

The researchers say their technology can theoretically tell if diabetic neuropathy is occurring by monitoring variations in heart rate. Meneghello says the technology, if successful, could not only alleviate physical pain, but also spare a person from traveling very far to regularly see a physician.

Link to the article here.