Making Fitness Part of Health Care

In an uncharacteristically noncompetitive manner, a consortium of Japanese
electronics companies - including Mitsubishi, Citizen, Sharp, and Hitachi -
have teamed up to establish a uniform standard for networking health care
equipment.

The goal is to allow cardio exercise devices like treadmills and elliptical
machines to interact with heart rate, blood pressure and other monitors to
produce an overall real-time profile graphing how an individual's training
affects his or her health.

At first glance this mechanization of health
indices looked a bit Big Brotherish, but as I thought about it, I realized that
this was something that might be helpful to me.

After a high-blood-pressure diagnosis a few years ago and some modest but
noticeable side effects from the medication (Cozaar) I was put on to control it,
I have worked to control my pressure through modifications in my diet and
exercise.

I now monitor my pressure regularly with a home cuff. It's not
cumbersome or unpleasant, but I did find it difficult to determine precisely
what triggered spikes or dips in my pressure. So I got a heart rate monitor to
track how my cardio training sessions would affect my pressure. My
non-scientific analysis seems to indicate that my workouts have a positive
effect on lowering my pressure - but not consistently.

I also occasionally use a pedometer to check out if I'm anywhere near to
approaching the 10,000 to 12,000 steps-a-day goal that Mark Fenton, the former
coach of the U.S. race walking team, says is optimal for health. And another
member of my family checks blood-glucose levels six times a day.


We could use a simple, one-stop way to integrate all our
respective data into a computer that would create an individual profile that
would allow us to easily monitor the results of our activities over
time.

Wouldn't it be nice if more companies followed the lead set by
the Japanese companies, and we could coordinate our fitness activities
seamlessly with our health care?

Imagine if, before our annual
physical, we could send our doctor a readout of our prior six months' profile so
he or she could see precisely what had affected our blood pressure or
cholesterol readings? Don't you wish insurance companies and HMOs would support
home diagnostic tools as integrated as this?