This week we were asked to design our "dream device". This could be anything we want, though, it had to be something we couldn't readily build, something that stretched our imaginations.
I knew immediately what I wanted to design. For a while I have been thinking about the state of our health care system and what the future of medicine and health care holds for me, my family, and friends.
A confluence of thoughts for me in this area has been the idea of "personalizing" medicine and health care. We are on the brink of being able to implement technology that will allow us to track our health in a minute by minute fashion. I believe this technology will empower individuals to learn more about their bodies and ultimately receive better and more comprehensive care. The following is my vision for one of the ways this might manifest in a device.
The links below will help to give a better understanding of the technologies that will be deployed inside the human body in order to enable the Personal Human Diagnostic Tool. There are also several animations that show the scale and level on which this device will gather information.
Wikipedia on Carbon nanotubes and applications
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube
Article on using Y shaped carbon nanotubes as transistors (switches)
http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20050715001807data_trunc_sys.shtml
Animation of inter-workings of cell. This gives an idea of the scale on which this device would gather information.Animation
Animation of how cells and proteins communicate. This allows us to see and envision the proteins and structures we could build that would detect various phenomena in the body and signal to an outside device what is happening.Animation
Animation of how we can engineer and build proteins into structures of our choosing.Animation
