[Reader-list] The future of wireless?

[Rana Dasgupta]

Two articles from Apr 26th 2007 edition of The Economist showing just 
how radical is the imagination of wireless technologies.  A company 
incapacitates your car remotely when your finances dwindle?  Chips 
inside your body to get into a nightclub?

The Economist chooses to be upbeat about such developments, which in 
some ways may be the only choice.  But how one operates in the 
diminished zones of invisibility will require some creativity, perhaps.

R


Wireless incorporated
Gizmos are starting to be slipped inside people

THE Baja Beach Club in Barcelona is an unlikely demonstration model for 
wireless technology. Bikini-clad waitresses serve drinks to guests as a 
DJ mixes music from a motorboat perched above the dance floor. But the 
club made headlines three years ago when it introduced a unique form of 
entry ticket to its VIP area: a microchip implanted in the patron's arm.

Slightly larger than a grain of rice and enrobed in glass and silicon, 
the chip is used to identify people when they enter and pay for drinks. 
It is injected by a nurse with an intimidating syringe under a local 
anaesthetic. In essence, it is an RFID tag. If a special tag-reader is 
waved near the arm, a radio signal prompts the chip to transmit an 
identification number which is used to call up information about the 
wearer in a computer database. Otherwise the chip is dormant. The 
“intelligence” of the system is in the computer, not the capsule.

It is the first time that chips have been placed in humans as a means of 
identification and payment, gushes Conrad Chase, the club's co-owner, 
who came up with the idea and was the first volunteer to be “tagged”. “I 
know a lot of people have fears about it,” he says. But he points out 
that many people already have piercings and tattoos. “Having a 
radio-transmitting chip under your skin makes you very unique,” he says 
wryly.

All this for a mojito might seem a bit extreme—which for a night club is 
precisely the point. Even so, take-up has been low: only 94 people have 
been tagged in Barcelona and 70 at another Baja club in Rotterdam. But 
as go the bohemians, so, eventually, go the rest of us.

CityWatcher.com, an American firm that provides video surveillance in 
cities, has experimented with tagging two employees to give them access 
to areas where sensitive data are stored. VeriChip, another American 
company that sells chips and readers, provides it to hospitals to manage 
patients (though only around 200 people have so far raised their arm to 
get one). The idea of tagging immigrant workers in the United States has 
been brought up in Congress.

There is much more to come. As wireless technology improves, it is not 
only getting attached to machinery and embedded in the environment, but 
slipping under people's skin as well. And RFID capsules are small fry. 
There are far more advanced wireless medical devices that measure body 
functions and transmit the information from the skin surface or from 
inside the body. As the huge cohort of baby-boomers grows older and 
becomes more interested in preventive medicine, people now aged 50 or 
younger are quite likely to have some form of wireless gizmo attached or 
implanted in their lifetime.

Wireless technology has been used in medicine for decades. Pacemakers 
rely on a basic wireless system to set a stable heartbeat. Ultrasound 
and X-ray technologies are wireless. But as microchips become more 
powerful, devices shrink and battery life is extended, a host of 
companies are vying to take wireless technology deep into the human body.

Some wireless devices are ingested. Others are implanted. Some are 
attached to the body and linked to a network. It is still early days, 
but the systems are improving fast. “The basic technology to make these 
things happen exists; the big issue is how to make this economically 
viable,” says Maarten Barmentlo, the chief technology officer of 
Philips's consumer health-care division.

Inside story

Already a gaggle of gadgets is available for specialised uses. Take the 
PillCam, developed by Given Imaging in Israel, a tiny two-sided camera 
the size of a very large pill which patients swallow. It has been used 
in more than half a million gastro-intestinal endoscopy tests since 
2001. One version is used to diagnose disorders of the oesophagus and 
another for those of the small intestine. It snaps a pre-set number of 
pictures per second and sends them wirelessly to a data recorder worn on 
the patient's waist. The images are downloaded to a computer for 
diagnosis. The $450 capsule passes through the bowel naturally and is 
flushed down the toilet.

This method lets people go about their normal business for most of the 
eight-hour test, during which up to 50,000 images are generated. It 
marks a vast improvement on an older technique that involves pushing a 
long tube through a patient's digestive tract. Although that procedure 
allows doctors to take tissue samples, it is uncomfortable and risks 
irritating the tract. Now Given Imaging is in clinical trials with a 
wireless camera for inspecting the colon, and is developing another for 
the stomach. The company faces competition from Olympus, a Japanese 
camera-maker, which is using similar technology.

Other wireless systems are implanted in the body. Medtronic, a large 
medical-device-maker, is developing many products that use wireless 
communications. Last year it won regulatory approval for an implantable 
defibrillator that links up with hospital equipment or a home monitoring 
device. Along with three other companies—CardioMEMS, St Jude Medical and 
Remon Medical Technologies—Medtronic is racing to market a device for 
congestive heart failure, which afflicts many millions of people 
worldwide. Once implanted, the device will measure pressure and fluid 
inside a patient's heart and wirelessly send the data to an external 
unit. With regular monitoring, patients will be alerted to abnormalities 
at an early stage.

There are two ways of making the wireless work, marking a division in 
the industry about the future of wireless technology in health care. 
Medtronic and St Jude currently make large-matchbox-sized devices—in 
essence, miniaturised computers—that are implanted in the chest and 
connected to the heart with leads, but can be interrogated wirelessly 
from outside the body by a reader at close quarters.

A more novel approach involves either radio waves or ultrasound 
technology. CardioMEMS uses radio-frequency technology, activating the 
chip in the implanted device by a reader that sends a burst of energy 
(like an RFID tag) to which the device responds with the heart-pressure 
information. Remon relies on a form of ultrasound that transmits energy 
to power the chip and prompt it to send back its pressure readings. 
Because the electromagnetic frequencies it uses are low, the reader can 
be farther away.

All four companies' heart-failure devices are still at the trial stage. 
In March Medtronic suffered a setback when a panel at America's Food and 
Drug Administration rejected its device, called Chronicle, because the 
trial data showed it to be insufficiently effective. Meanwhile, Remon is 
applying its technology to what it calls “intra-body wireless 
communications”. By dividing up the signal, this allows several devices 
inside the body to relay information to each other or to a receiver 
without interference, just as a radio can be tuned to different 
stations. So an implanted glucose-level reader in one part of the body 
could communicate with an implanted insulin-pump elsewhere, says Hezi 
Himelfarb, the boss of Remon.

Such scenarios are not so far from being realised. Sensors for Medicine 
and Science (SMSI) is developing a glucose sensor to be placed just 
under the skin of the forearm that connects to a watch-like wireless 
reader. This will probably become the most common way of deploying the 
technology: not by surgery deep into the body, but by inserting a sensor 
below the skin that can last for months or years, and having a wireless 
reader nearby.

This is the method used by Thomas Ferrell of the University of 
Tennessee, who has developed an implantable capsule that measures 
ethanol concentration in the blood. He says it could be used by 
alcoholics who volunteer for monitoring as an alternative to prison. The 
technology, funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and 
Alcoholism, is currently being tested in animals. Dr Ferrell expects it 
to become available commercially within two years.

Listen to me

Earlier Dr Ferrell spearheaded a DARPA initiative to create a tiny chip 
that would fit into a person's ear and monitor vital signs such as body 
temperature, pulse and blood pressure. The work was put on ice five 
years ago because of the huge cost of developing the technology that was 
available at the time. But now that the cost has fallen and the 
technology improved, the project is becoming feasible. Later this year 
the work is due to be resurrected by a start-up, Senior Vitals, to 
produce sensors for monitoring elderly people.

The technology to monitor people's vital signs already exists: NASA does 
it for astronauts in flight. But for the moment there is no business 
model for applying it on the ground, no IT system to manage it and no 
company that could carry out the work. As with M2M communications, any 
system would have to be tailor-made, which would make it very expensive. 
And as with other wireless devices, powering the electronics is a problem.

But companies are beginning to show interest in the sector. Adi Gan of 
Evergreen Venture Partners, a venture-capital fund in Israel, says that 
numerous business plans in this area have crossed his desk in recent 
months. He sees a lot of promise. For example, a doctor might implant a 
sensor during surgery to offer far better post-operative monitoring and 
care. When the patient comes for a follow-up visit, the doctor's reader 
would power the chip, which would provide medical information. Tiny 
devices could even be used for treating diseases. They might be powered 
wirelessly to, say, burn new cancer cells in an area that had previously 
been treated.

Such uses of wireless seem far removed from the mobile phones which vast 
numbers of people carry with them at all times. But there is a 
connection. As the use of wireless medical devices grows, the best way 
of collecting the data and sending them to a remote monitoring centre 
may turn out to be the patient's mobile phone, which will be close 
enough to receive data from the low-powered implanted device. It could 
be the critical bit of infrastructure between wireless communications in 
the body and the global internet. Just when people are starting to think 
of the mobile phone as a wallet, they find that it is becoming the 
family doctor too.

Mobile-phone operators understand the potential. South Korean and 
Japanese carriers are experimenting with technologies that let people 
monitor their heart rate, blood pressure and other vital signs with home 
devices and transmit the data using a phone. Philips and GE are adding 
wireless technology to patients' home-monitoring devices. Yet today's 
mobile networks are not sufficiently reliable for anything other than 
non-critical uses, according to a study in 2005 from the University of 
Massachusetts in Amherst. And the operators' current pricing models are 
a major barrier, says Matt Welsh of Harvard University, who is 
developing sensors for the continuous monitoring of vital signs.

For now the advances are largely coming from the IT industry, not the 
medical sector, which is noted for its conservatism. Whereas 
pharmaceutical firms are starting to use RFID tags on medicine packages 
as an anti-counterfeiting measure, other companies are working to put 
RFID tags onto individual pills. In January Kodak filed for a patent on 
an edible RFID tag which could be used, for example, to examine the 
digestive tract or check whether a patent has taken his medication.

It all seems a long way from the Baja Beach Club, where Mr Chase goes 
about his nightly routine. He reviews images from security cameras, some 
of which are wireless, and then locks an office with keys using a 
wireless ID system that records who enters where and when. The geeky 
stuff is his doing, but then he has form. Back in the 1980s, long before 
opening his nightclub, he served in the US Army Signal Corps, working on 
the ARPANET, the military precursor to the internet.






When everything connects
Information technology has nothing to lose but its cables


THE wireless was once a big, wood-panelled machine glowing faintly in 
the corner of the living-room. Today's wireless device is the sleek 
mobile phone nestling in your pocket. In coming years wireless will 
vanish entirely from view, as communications chips are embedded in a 
host of everyday objects. Such chips, and the networks that link them 
together, could yet prove to be the most potent wireless of them all.

Just as microprocessors have been built into everything in the past few 
decades, so wireless communications will become part of objects big and 
small. The possibilities are legion. Gizmos and gadgets will talk to 
other devices—and be serviced and upgraded from afar. Sensors on 
buildings and bridges will run them efficiently and ensure they are 
safe. Wireless systems on farmland will measure temperature and humidity 
and control irrigation systems. Tags will certify the origins and 
distribution of food and the authenticity of medicines. Tiny chips on or 
in people's bodies will send vital signs to clinics to help keep them 
healthy.

The end of the line

The computing revolution was about information—digitising documents, 
photographs and records so that they could more easily be manipulated. 
The wireless-communications revolution is about making digital 
information about anything available anywhere at almost no cost. No 
longer tied down by wires and cables, more information about more things 
will get to the place where it is most valuable.

For the moment, the mobile phone is stealing the show. It is evolving 
from a simple phone into a wallet, keychain, health monitor and 
navigation device. But as mobile-phone technology matures, even more 
innovation is taking place in areas of wireless that link things only 
metres or millimetres apart.

For that, thank the cross-breeding of Marconi's radio and the 
microprocessor. Etched into silicon, the radio is starting to benefit 
from the dramatic decreases in size and cost and the huge increase in 
performance that have recently propelled computing. Satellite-navigation 
chips today cost as little as a dollar apiece. Radio-frequency 
identification (RFID) tags can be made so tiny that they fit into the 
groove of a thumb-print. When power can be wirelessly routed to such 
devices, something that is not far off, all the pieces will be in place.

Wireless brings countless benefits, as our special report in this issue 
describes. Devices and objects can be monitored or controlled at a 
distance. Huge amounts of data that were once impossible or too 
expensive to collect will become the backbone of entirely new services. 
Wireless communications should boost productivity just as information 
technology has.

Imagine how wireless communications could change motoring. Carmakers are 
starting to monitor vehicles so that they know when to replace parts 
before they fail, based on changes in vibration or temperature. If there 
is a crash, wireless chips could tell the emergency services where to 
come, what has happened and if anyone is hurt. Traffic information can 
be instantaneous and perfectly accurate. They administer tolls based on 
precise routes. One American firm leases cars to people with bad credit 
who cannot get a loan, knowing that if payments are missed it can block 
the ignition and find the car to repossess it. British insurers offer 
policies with premiums based on precisely when and where a person drives.

Of course, plenty of work will be needed before wireless communications 
can realise their promise. The first obstacle is novelty. As is usual in 
the early days of a new industry, all kinds of proprietary systems 
abound, many of them built from scratch—rather as early computer hackers 
fiddled with their Altairs in the mid-1970s. Until common standards and 
protocols emerge for machine-to-machine and wireless sensor 
communications, costs will be a problem.

It is not yet clear who will bang heads together to set standards. 
Today's mobile-phone businesses may be too busy getting people to talk 
to bother much about talking machines. Sony Ericsson and Nokia, two 
giants of the mobile-phone industry, have in recent years sold their 
machine-to-machine divisions. Mobile operators see the new field as such 
a small part of their overall business that it gets relegated to the 
back-burner. That has left an opening for fleet-footed firms from 
computing, as well as industrial conglomerates, such as Samsung, 
Philips, Honeywell and Hitachi. Just this week, General Electric's 
sensing division said it wanted to use wireless sensors in industries as 
diverse as drugs and petrochemicals.

Government will play a crucial role, not least because radio spectrum 
will be in short supply. That makes it more important than ever that the 
airwaves are sensibly allocated according to the ability to pay. Special 
“reserves” and unlicensed spectrum could be put aside for emerging 
technologies that lack financial or political clout. And politicians and 
business people would do well to keep an eye on the health risks of 
electromagnetic radiation. No serious evidence yet suggests it is a 
danger—but the nonsense over genetically modified foods shows how much a 
new technology needs popular approval.

Change is in the air

A greater concern in the long term is privacy. Today's laws often assume 
that privacy is guaranteed by a pact between consumer and company, or 
citizen and state. In a world where many networks interconnect on the 
fly and information is widely shared, that will not work. At a minimum, 
wireless networks should let users know when they are being monitored.

But for the moment the danger is surely too much regulation, not too 
little. It is hard for anyone—politicians most of all—to picture how 
wireless will be used, just as it was with electric motors and 
microprocessors, two earlier stand-alone technologies that have been 
built into a plethora of devices. Wireless technology will become a part 
of objects in the next 50 years rather as electric motors appeared in 
everything from eggbeaters to elevators in the first half of the 20th 
century and computers colonised all kinds of machinery from cars to 
coffee machines in the second half. Occasionally, the results will be 
frightening; more often, they will be amazingly useful.