Today… A Car That Takes Your Pulse, Tomorrow A Card or Implant That Controls Your Life

WSJ – Cross-Posted at AskMarion and at True Health Is True Wealth: What the car of the near future will sense about your biology. Auto makers are researching technology that could feed your heart rate, blood pressure and other biometric responses into the car's computers, the better to determine when you're drowsy or overwhelmed with distracting media. MIT researcher Bryan Reimer and WSJ's Joe White has details on Lunch Break. See Video

A Car That Takes Your Pulse

Designing Vehicles To Monitor Brain Waves, Sleepiness

Could a car that knows when you are stressed or ill save you from having an accident? Auto makers are stepping up efforts to find out.

A number of big car manufacturers are accelerating research into equipping vehicles with so-called biometric sensors that would keep tabs on a driver's vital health signs, including pulse, breathing and "skin conductance," aka sweaty palms. When that information is fed into the computers that manage a car's safety systems, it could enable a vehicle to better react to whatever challenges the road and traffic dish out.

The move comes amid major advances in mobile medical-monitoring technology, as well as growing concerns about meeting the needs of an aging and increasingly distracted population of motorists.

It also reflects another step in the industry's broader move toward self-driving cars, a brave new world in which computers could all but eliminate the potential for driver error—whether it's due to a distracting phone call or a sudden drop in blood sugar.

Already, some Lexus models use in-cabin cameras and some Mercedes-Benz vehicles have steering sensors to detect drowsy-driving behavior. The cars sound a warning beep or flash a coffee-cup icon to suggest that it's time for a break. Luxury brands are promoting these accident-avoidance technologies as examples of what sets their expensive vehicles apart from cheaper, mainstream models. The Mercedes system, called Attention Assist, comes as standard equipment in a wide range of its vehicles, from the smaller C-class sedans to the more opulent, and high-tech, S-class models.

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Separately, car makers and federal safety regulators are working on in-vehicle systems that could reliably detect when someone is too drunk to drive.

The new body monitors could, if a driving hazard appeared imminent, trigger the car's safety systems to tap the brakes, turn off a radio, block a cellphone from ringing or take other actions. Some of these advances may be in cars in three to five years. Others depend upon whether researchers can crack the challenge of designing health-related sensors that can work flawlessly in a vehicle for up to a decade.

Sports car maker Ferrari SpA, for one, has filed a patent application that indicates the company is evaluating technology that would embed wireless electrodes in a car seat's headrest to monitor drivers' brain waves for stress as they pilot machines capable of roaring up to 200 miles per hour. Depending on what the sensors detect, the car might try to mitigate the driver's risk by cutting power to the motor or automatically stabilizing the vehicle. As Ferrari researchers put it in the patent filing: "drivers tend to miscalculate—in particular, overestimate—their driving skill and, more important, their psychophysical condition."

At Ford Motor Co., F +1.26%researchers are looking at connecting information from medical monitors, like seat-belt-based respiration sensors and steering-wheel heart-rate trackers, to its cars' in-dash multimedia systems.

Ford's prototype system aims to lessen distraction by taking readouts from biometric sensors and combining the data with information from the car, including speed, steering-wheel angle, and data from radar sensors or cameras used in blind-spot obstacle detection or cruise control. All the data are run through software that can gauge the driver's overall stress level. If it is high, the system could automatically engage a "Do Not Disturb" function for the driver's phone.

Jeff Greenberg, a senior technical leader involved with the Ford research, says the broad goal is to minimize driver distraction and stress. This may involve keeping people engaged and alert on a boring drive to work or helping them stay focused in more difficult driving moments. If a truck looms out of the blind spot during a high-speed freeway merge, for example, a driver would be better off if his phone's ringer was disabled at that moment, he says.

Mr. Greenberg says phone-disabling technology could come to showrooms "relatively quickly." Adding the biometric sensors, he says, "is further out." Ford classifies those technologies as research projects that typically are at least three to five years from being offered to consumers.

One reason: The technology is evolving faster than issues such as medical privacy and regulatory oversight can be resolved. Ford, like other auto makers, is loath to add the Food and Drug Administration to an already heavy regulatory load.

Car makers hope that vehicles with medical monitors will appeal to an aging population that wants to keep driving.

"If we want to keep people in their vehicles, it's key we integrate systems to support them," says Bryan Reimer, a researcher with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab, which focuses on innovations for an aging population. AgeLab has worked with Toyota Motor Corp., 7203.TO -1.56%Ford and other companies to test how biometric sensors could be used both to guide the design of vehicles to make them easier to operate and as onboard systems to help people drive more safely.

Getty Images/Onoky

A number of big car manufacturers are accelerating research into equipping vehicles with so-called biometric sensors that would keep tabs on a driver's vital health signs.

Dick Myrick, a 63-year-old retired electrical engineer from Arlington, Mass., participated in AgeLab experiments in biometrically monitored driving. His says he would be interested in a car that kept tabs on his condition as part of its safety technology, but only if he was in control of the system. "I need to know that the function is on, and have it not on when I want," he says.

Others see the new technology as yet another thing to keep track of behind the wheel. It's "a further distraction" for drivers, says Gabrielle Lucci, 60, a Farmington Hills, Mich., retiree.

Devices that collect data about an individual's physical condition are getting cheaper and smaller. Many are designed to connect to smartphones using the same Bluetooth technology that connects smartphones to cars. This provides a gateway for wirelessly connecting devices like glucose or heart monitors into a car's multimedia displays.

"The same sensor you are wearing for your weekend warrior stuff…is the sensor you could slap on your mother" to monitor her heart, says Leslie Saxon, a cardiologist who leads the University of Southern California's Center for Body Computing. Dr. Saxon's project recently formed a research alliance with German luxury car maker BMW BMW.XE +0.72% AG.

Daniel Grein, a BMW designer, says the USC research could help determine how to connect a Bluetooth-equipped blood-sugar monitor to future BMW models. In Munich, he says, BMW engineers are also investigating how to design a car that could automatically stop if the driver suffered a heart attack.

Dr. Saxon says he sees a time when biometric monitors in a car could feed data, not just to onboard safety systems, but also to doctors and patients looking to better manage health care. "My car calls me when it needs something," Dr. Saxon says, referring to vehicle-service alerts generated by the car. "I want patients' cars to call them when they need blood-pressure medicine."

Sound interesting? Might increase safety? But as Founding Father Benjamin Franklin said, “He who trades security (or safety) for freedom" usually gets (nor deserves) either!!” Wake-up America, Europe, Christians, Patriots, lovers of freedom… this is Big Brother 1984 style all the way! Today it is a smart car… tomorrow it will be a smart card. Be sure to watch the video below and then you be the judge!

Video: Smart card (made 2005)

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Technorati Tags: Smart Card,Smart Car,Big Brother,watch the other hand,RFID,Implants,Big Brother is watching you,1984,RFID chip part of healthcare bill,NWO,safety,smoke and mirrors,BMW,smartphones,wake- up,wake-up America,biometric monitors,Benjamin Franklin,safety vs freedom

Christian Family Refuses Mandatory RFID Chip at Texas School

Video:  Christian Family Refuses Mandatory RFID Chip at Texas School

Tracking School Children With RFID Tags? It’s All About the Benjamins

Student body ID cards with RFID-embedded chips. Image: Northside Independent School District

Just as the U.S. Department of Agriculture mandates Radio Frequency Identification Device chips to monitor livestock, a Texas school district just begun implanting the devices on student identification cards to monitor pupils’ movements on campus, and to track them as they come and go from school.

Tagging school children with RFID chips is uncommon, but not new. A federally funded preschool in Richmond, California, began embedding RFID chips in students’ clothing in 2010. And an elementary school outside of Sacramento, California, scrubbed a plan in 2005 amid a parental uproar. And a Houston, Texas, school district began using the chips to monitor students on 13 campuses in 2004.

It was only a matter of time. Radio frequency identification devices are a daily part of the electronic age, and are fast becoming a part of passports, libraries and payment cards, and are widely expected to replace bar-code labels on consumer goods.

And it appears that the educational move to Big Brother-style monitoring is motivated mainly by money, despite privacy and health concerns.

Two schools at the Northside Independent School District in San Antonio began issuing the RFID-chip-laden student-body cards when classes began last Monday. Like most state-financed schools, their budgets are tied to average daily attendance. If a student is not in his seat during morning roll call, the district doesn’t receive daily funding for that pupil, because the school has no way of knowing for sure if the student is there.

But with the RFID tracking, students not at their desk but tracked on campus are counted as being in school that day, and the district receives its daily allotment for that student.

“What we have found, they are there, they’re in the building and not in their chairs. They are in the cafeteria, with counselors, in stairwells or a variety of places, some legitimately and some not,” district spokesman Pascual Gonzalez said in a telephone interview. “If they are on campus, we can legally count them present.”

The Spring Independent School District in Houston echoed the same theory when it announced results of its program in 2010. “RFID readers situated throughout each campus are used to identify where students are located in the building, which can be used to verify the student’s attendance for ADA funding and course credit purposes,” the district said.

But privacy groups are wary.

“We don’t think kids in schools should be treated like cattle,” Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said in a telephone interview. “We generally don’t like it. My take on RFID is it’s fine for products, but not so much for people. That’s one of the places where the lines need to be drawn. ”

But there appears to be dozens of companies who see no need to draw such a line and offer their RFID wares to monitor students in what is still a tiny but growing market. Among the biggest companies in the market: AT&T.

“One day soon, home room teachers in your local middle and high schools may stop scanning rows of desks and making each student yell out ‘Here!’ during a morning roll call. Instead, small cards, or tags, carried by each student will transmit a unique serial number via radio signal to an electronic reader near the school door,” AT&T says in its RFID-student advertising materials.

Gonzalez said there has been minimal parental and student opposition to the program at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School. The pilot project could expand to the Northside Independent School District’s 110 other schools, he said.

As for privacy, the system only monitors a student’s movements on campus. Once a student leaves campus, the chips no longer communicate with the district’s sensors.

He said the chips, which are not encrypted and chronicle students only by a serial number, also assist school officials to pinpoint where kids are at any given time, which he says is good for safety reasons. “With this RFID, we know exactly where the kid is within the school,” he said noting students are required to wear the ID on a lanyard at all times on campus.

The lack of encryption makes it not technically difficult to clone a card to impersonate a fellow student or to create a substitute card to play hooky, and makes the cards readable by anyone who wanted to install their own RFID reader, though all they would get is a serial number that’s correlated with the student’s ID number in a school database.

EPIC’s Rotenberg was among about two dozen health and privacy advocates who signed an August position paper blasting the use of RFID chips in schools.

The paper, which included signatures from the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation and, among others, Big Brother Watch, said the RFID systems may have “potential” (.pdf) health risks, too.

“RFID systems emit electromagnetic radiation, and there are lingering questions about whether human health might be affected in environments where the reading devices are pervasive,” the paper said. “This concern and the dehumanizing effects of ubiquitous surveillance may place additional stress on students, parents, and teachers.”

Gonzalez said John Jay High has 200 surveillance cameras and Anson Jones Middle School, about 90.

“The kids,” he said, “are used to being monitored.”

Also Checkout: Parental Rights in the U.S. >> Go to http://parentalrights.org/

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Technorati Tags: War on Christianity,Christians,Christianity,RFID chips,Texas,Big Brother,Constitution,parental rights,parenting,God,First Amendment,Bill of Rights,individual freedoms,freedom is not free,stand-up American,stand-up Christians,1984,Verichip in the Healthcare Bill,Verichip,Microchips,Smart Card

Thought For The Day - 12.02.08

“The Gate Test…  The True Test of a Country is the Gate Test… When You Open the Gate (Or The Borders), Do People Run In or Out?”

America has always been the country people have wanted to run into… and have legally and illegally, by the millions, in the past 10-years.  The two main things that have brought millions here are the Bill of Rights and the opportunity to earn an honest living.   

The question then is how long will that be the case as we have and continue to voluntarily give up our rights and freedoms in the name of security?!? 

New ID Scanners at Borders Raise Privacy Alarm (Very Big Brother)
The federal government has already deployed new detection machines that can scan citizens without their knowledge from as far as 50 feet away and "read" their personal documents such as passports or driver's licenses. The Homeland Security Department touts the high-tech devices as increasing security at border crossings, but privacy advocates are raising all sorts of red flags. Critics say the new machines, which read one's personal information right through a wallet or purse, do so without consent or a warrant and may set a worrisome precedent. The devices, called Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) machines, allow officials to read remotely any passports, pass cards, and driver's licenses that contain special chips with personal information. The RFIDs are so sensitive that, even before a vehicle pulls up at a border checkpoint, agents already will have on their computer screen the personal data of the passengers, including each person's name, date of birth, nationality, passport or ID number, and even a digitized photo. The new gadgets are in place, or soon will be, at five border crossings: Blaine, Wash.; Buffalo; Detroit; Nogales, Ariz.; and San Ysidro, Calif. They are slated to have a dramatically expanded presence in June. Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that the technology could make Americans less secure because terrorists or other criminals may be able to steal the personal information off the ID cards remotely. Tien and other critics warn that people up to no good can use their own RFID machines in a process called "skimming" to read the information from as far as 50 feet. Indeed, consumer privacy expert Katherine Albrecht maintains that the chips create the "potential for a whole surveillance network to be set up." Among other abuses, she says police could use them to track criminals; abusive husbands could use the technology to find their wives; and stores could trail the shopping patterns of patrons. Homeland Security, however, rebuts the criticism, arguing that the embedded chips surrender only a code to machine readers. That code is then broken in order to display the personal information on the border agents' screen. Meanwhile, the same agencies that are issuing the newfangled IDs supply a sleeve that keep out all prying electronic eyes when not in use. By: Dave Eberhart Posted 2008 Newsmax