How a Car Might Be Able to Help You Manage Your Personal Health

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One of last year's highlights here at Medgadget was Ford's endeavor to help track one's health while cruising down the freeway. It became a huge player in in-car health management back in May when it announced a partnership with Medtronic and other companies to wirelessly track blood glucose levels, document things like asthma attacks and allergic reactions, and lookup local allergy-related information and environmental health indices, all through Ford's Sync hands-free entertainment and control system.

This past week at CES 2012′s Digital Health Summit in Las Vegas, Ford announced another alliance between Microsoft, Healthrageous, and BlueMetal Architects to expand even further the ways that the vehicle can monitor people's health. BlueMetal Architects are the designers of a prototype system which "extend(s) health management into the personal vehicle in a nonintrusive fashion." Healthrageous' role in the system is to take health information shared by the user, such as blood pressure, fitness activity, and glucose levels, and provide guidance in shedding unhealthy habits. Microsoft's technology translates robotic sensory information provided by the vehicle into a user-friendly, voice- and touch-activated interface to control the whole experience. Its HealthVault technology is also part of the system and will process much of the data and generate useful graphical reports for the user.

Here's a video explaining Ford's overall vision for in-car health management, as well as a short demo of some of the technologies we wrote about in May:

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This post also appears on medGadget, an Atlantic partner site.