"Here's a scenario: You find yourself sitting in a local emergency room, or standing in the admitting line of an emergency clinic. But instead of just cooling your heels (and having a cardboard tag tied around your neck, as Gulf Coast clinics did after Katrina), you've been given a fanny pack containing a pocket-sized computer and ultrasound transponder. And wires come out of it, leading to a sensor on your finger and some more on your chest. Now, if something happens -- say, you quietly go into a cardiac arrest -- the doctors will know and can come running.

After two and a half years of development, the SMART team plans to test its prototype system on actual emergency patients at the Brigham this summer. Each monitored patient would get a fanny pack containing a "pocket PC" from Hewlett-Packard (the iPaq h5500), says Dorothy Curtis, research scientist in computer science and artificial intelligence at MIT."

Source: MIT Technology Review