A team of scientists led by MIT professor Michael Strano has concluded that unexpected findings from biologging (the practice of implanting sensors in animals) should “cause a seismic shift in how wearable sensors are used to promote health in humans.”
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The team states that while the animals are fitted with sensors in order to measure one or two behaviors, scientists were able to gain dramatic and unforeseen insights into a wealth of other habits.
Take for example the jaw sensor, which is implanted in penguins, sea lions, and dolphins. To the uninitiated the tiny device may look like it’s only able to know if the jaw is moving up or down. For scientists, however, it’s much more than that. By drilling down on the size and frequency of signals, scientists are able to know when the animal is chewing, swallowing, or capturing prey. They are also able to know what type of food the animal eats and how long it feeds.
Which is fine and dandy if you’re interested in the gustatory habits of, say, the Northern rockhopper penguin.
But the scientists argue it is also of critical importance for the emerging science of wearable health monitoring, not least because most of us are already sensor-enabled.
“[R]oughly three billion people owned smartphones in 2018, effectively already being tagged with a subset of sensors,” they write.
Researchers have used smartphone tapping behaviour to predict Parkinson’s disease, analysed text and email data to detect depressed speech and even used the camera to measure heart rate by look at skin colour changes in the finger.
More details over at Cosmos.
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(Image Credit: GDJ/ Pixabay)
Source: neatorama