Lately I’ve been thinking mobile. I slipped down this path when I started exploring possible mobile applications for Time Trails–sorry, those will stay under wraps. I believe that’s what lead to my bizarre dream sometime early this morning.
I don’t usually dream about phone apps or pandemics, but this one included the both of them. To set the stage for this dream, which was really just a subconscious brainstorming session, I need to briefly touch on the possible capabilities of mobile phones in the future. Prepare for a bulleted list of assumptions for the future that won’t make this dream seem too absurd. Right!
Here goes:
- Mobile phones will communicate with everything, passively and actively. Yes, everything–from toasters to cash registers (one of the creators of Twitter is already on top of the latter).
- Medical records will have been digitized and stored in a national database. This also assumes that there is more of a collective approach to caring for sick.
- Public health concerns like H1N1 will still pop up from time to time, cause more of a problem with a more dense populous, and health officials will look for ways to isolate the incidents ASAP.
- We will no longer care about privacy.
- The Chiefs will eventually stop sucking. Hah hah…not! I’m talking like 5-10 years out here.
Ok, so now to explaining the dream. Imagine you or someone you know contracts beaver flu (hypothetical scary flu of the day). Hopefully someone you know and not you, right? Well anyway, someone gets a deadly strain of something and doctors need to know where it was contracted to stop its spread. Enter the cell phone.
There's beaver flu all over the place here..
Let’s say our sickly subject happened to have a chance encounter with some random carrier of beaver flu on a subway–no not on a sandwich…the train kind. In the future, cell phones would record this interaction and all kinds of other interactions with other devices or networks. Now assume that this random sick person infected our subject and he/she too ended up at a hospital diagnosed with the same condition.
That chance encounter could then be flagged by the sick person’s phone. It could send out alerts to everyone that got within their RFID field of their cell phone. Imagine your reaction to a text that you’ve been exposed to beaver flu! But hey, that way you could immediately seek treatment and maybe not die a slow and agonizing death.
This all assumes way too much obviously, but I think there’s some real potential here.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }