Doctors in Wales & England have set out in the great tradition of Victorian Categorizing Explorers who sought to Find, Classify and Catalog every single last species of life in the known world;
just like the big man himself, Charles Darwin.
-Except this time, with Pee!
Funny; you would’ve thought either the Japanese, the Dutch, or the Germans would come up with this first; but apparently not. Hrm…
So the idea is 2-Fold:
1) Identify what patients have eaten in the past few days, because they’re all SHAMEFUL HORRIBLE AWFUL -LIARS-!!! Who cannot be trusted to tell their dox one bit of truth about their dietary intake.
and then the more interesting, study-oriented, data-mining approach:
2) Does it really smell bad when EVERYONE has Asparagus?
ok, ok, not really; the Real use is:
2) To use the Metabolite-Fingerprinting-Darwinesque-Encyclopeedia the researchers are compiling as a way to Record who had how much of what type of Dietary Inputs, and then what their subsequent Health History turned out to be over the course of their Lives.
-And then to whizz that datastream out as a feedback loop to the Practicers & Researchers, so health-science gets better over time.
Not that there will be any great revelations at-first.
-They’ll probably find more evidence of what we’ve always been told was bad, really IS actually bad for you.
My Guess: The Really Interesting Bit will come about when the smaller, more hidden relationships are unearthed.
Ex:-How much of x with too little of y, for a person with z risk for a disease(s) in their family hits a tipping-point to where they Actually get what disease, etc.
+And are there Vegas odds-makers spawned from that pool of info? -Because I’ve got a $fiver on Steve Ballmer having either an Aneurysm, Heart-Attack, or IBS with Constipation inside of 7 years.
-Who wants a piece of that bet, eh? Any takers? Come ON!! ::smashes chair over tech-reporter’s head::
Anyway: This device, plus long-term relational-database storage of their info on big servers might even be able to use some type of Wall-Street-Spawned, High-Frequency-Trading Algorithmic Artificial Intelligence Query Engine to warn of a possible risk to the patient that perhaps an otherwise-busy GP doc just didn’t have the time to pick up.
The only problem of course would be AMOUNT of data, because unless you make some type of Home-Version of the thing, a doctor might only get 1 dataset every 6 months.
Neat Idea. +Oh well, we can hope…
=>Outsource all Healthcare Work to a Robot in the House, a Sensor in the Bathroom, a Server-Farm in Alaska, and a Call-Center in Mumbai!!!
-BOOM!!- NO MORE DOCTORS!
-SEE!!! The Terminator Was Right! the machines really are taking over!!! … … …
Photo Credits: The Terminator DVD Cover Artwork, by James Cameron, Hemdale Film Corporation, Pacific Western Productions, and Orion Pictures
Links:
• Source: NU-Lie Diet-tector
• via: BBC
• More Coverage:
NU-Human Nutrition Research Centre
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