RFID, GPS Technology and Electronic Surveillance

Novartis Invests Wisely in Smart Pill

January 18, 2010

Seeking Alpha - Novartis (NVS) is ramping up its commitment to personalized medicine with a $24 million investment in Proteus Biomedical, a pioneer of high-tech pills featuring embedded ingestible sensors. Smart pills are a hot technology in the never-ending quest to improve drug delivery in novel, profitable ways.

Tiny but sophisticated, Proteus' design can both monitor a patient's vital signs and track compliance with prescription drug regimens. The pills transmit information to a microelectronic receiver worn either as a skin patch or implanted under the skin.

For Novartis, the benefits of such a technology are clear. As much as $290 billion, 13 percent of total health care expenditures, is added to the cost of healthcare annually by patients deviating from their prescribed course of meds according to a study by the New England Healthcare Institute. Giving doctors and insurers a mass-market tool for keeping patients on track while lowering overall treatment costs could allow Novartis a strong justification for charging premium prices. It should also help boost the company’s bottom line, since it and other pharmaceutical companies lose significant revenue from patients skipping out on their prescribed pills.

Placing a bet on a drug delivery technology with potential to be applied to a wide variety of products also fits with Novartis' bigger picture diversification strategy, as illustrated by its recent bid for Alcon (ACL). Developing sources of non-drug revenue may take on critical importance as patents on the company's drugs expire in future years.

Novartis says it plans to apply Proteus' pharmaceutical technology to its organ transplantation drug business initially and has rights to apply it later in cancer and cardiovascular applications. The technology is currently in clinical trials with heart failure patients. The $24 million investment is in the form of cash and equity up front and forms an exclusive worldwide licensing and collaboration bond between the two companies.

Proteus, based in Redwood City, California, has some strong competitors, including Philips' intelligent pill, or iPill. The iPill will target intestinal diseases such as Crohn’s disease, colitis and colon cancer. MicroCHIPS, based in Bedford, Massachusetts, has also developed a competing platform incorporating wireless biosensors and an experimental drug delivery system.

Australia's E-Health to Boost Patient Safety

January 18, 2010

Sky News - The federal government says its proposed e-health system will improve patient safety and free up GPs.

The system, currently under design, will see patient records stored in one national database that can be accessed by different health professionals.

The government hopes to see the opt-out system up and running in ten years, and says more than $1 million has been put on the table to get it started.

Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon says it will cut the time GPs spend pulling up patients health records during visits.

She insists the system will be secure and won't affect strict patient privacy laws.

'This doesn't change the existing laws of when it's appropriate for an individual have their records... accessed,' she told reporters in Canberra.

States, territories and health professionals will also have to invest in technologies to allow them to link into the system.

Former Australian Medical Association boss Dr Mukesh Haikerwal says it will enhance current medical practices.

'This is the way healthcare should be delivered in the future, safer, more effective and more efficient,' he told reporters.

The government will introduce legislation in parliament during the first half of the year to get the system started.

An Orwellian World for Big Brother (Excerpt)

Janury 15, 2010

Online Journal - ... Around the world, a near invisible network of RFID wireless tags is being put on almost every type of consumer item. Wireless tags and sensors are being produced in their billions and are capable of being connected to the Internet in an instant. Yet this network is being built with little public knowledge or consent ...

Sense Networks collects billions of data points about people’s locations from cell phones, taxi cabs, cameras, GPS devices, WiFi positioning, cell tower triangulation, RFID and other sensors to locate people and help predict human behaviour on a macro scale. This is the original text of the CitySense proposal submitted to the NSF Computing Research Infrastructure program in 2006.

Tracking and locating people and objects which are constantly moving is said to have become more important to the daily routine of individuals, commercial organisations, the emergency services [and governments].

GlobalTag is the first wireless tracking device that incorporates GPS, RFID, Sensors and Satellite Communications.

And the Viewpoint i2g can track assets and/or personnel whether they are indoors or out. ViewPoint integrates the interior positioning system (IPS) data of the ViewPoint system with data from global positioning system (GPS) sources. This integrated IPS and GPS information can be accessed from popular mapping services, including GoogleEarth and Microsoft Virtual Earth.

Considering that the doors of a many cars can be locked and unlocked with a signal, how long will it be before similar technology is applied to the doors and windows of all buildings, including each and every home. Each building will probably have a receptor which receives a signal and activates the locking of doors and windows. The receptors on homes in a housing estate, for instance, could be switched on or off, via the Internet of Things, in a manner similar to the way that a telecommunications company can disconnect some landline telephones in a street while leaving the other landlines in that street connected. Sometime in the future, people with anti-social tendencies may end up being locked up in their own homes while their fridges, lights and other household appliances are controlled by Big Brother through the Internet of Things.

A recent study for the European Commission entitled ‘Towards a future Internet’, stresses the view that much of the governance issues for the future Internet are related to political will and leadership . . . A balance must be struck between overregulation and under-regulation, a safe society and a surveillance society.

The future Internet should not be designed for technocrats, governments and businesses, but for ordinary citizens, while protecting their security and privacy and limiting government surveillance and Orwellian-like control. The report goes on to conclude that the current Internet administration has limited transparency and that the Internet has become increasingly ubiquitous and grown to become a critical infrastructure, on both a technical and socio-economic level and that in the future, there will be multiple Internets, rather than the single Internet we have today ...

Page 13 of the EIFFEL Report states:

"In the current economic and political situation, no country can make decisions that will have only a local effect. There is no more isolation. Given that, one must consider the relationship between the Internet and governance.

And perhaps even more importantly, the Internet may change forever governance of, by or for a people. Blogging and cell phone cameras that can transmit photos are having profound effects on the capability of individuals to constrain their governments at times when the governments may not want that."