What If Your Car Cared About Your Health?

When I first heard that Ford and other auto manufacturers were researching how to build health monitoring devices and interfaces into cars, my thoughts immediately turned to how my good ole boy mechanic would fix the darned thing.

"Well, Jim, yer valves are gonna need a good cleanin.' I can turn them brake rotors one more time but that there glucose monitor, that's a fac'try part and be about next Tuesday before I can get that in."

I have a well-earned distrust of gadgets and have learned that the best-engineered machines excel at the task for which they are designed reliably and simply. So a car that needs few repairs, is comfortable, gets good mileage, and lasts longer than the payments do is fine by me. But Ford sees a larger opportunity to add the car to those places where you are concerned about your health, specifically in monitoring it.

So Ford is developing "the car that cares," by linking health into the vehicle in three different ways, explains Gary Strumolo, manager of Infotainment, Interiors, and Health and Wellness at Ford Research and Innovation.

"The reality is that most people go their entire lives without suffering a serious auto accident, but if they suffer chronic illness, they suffer from that every day of their lives," Strumolo says. "So if we really want to extend this notion of automotive safety, we need to address those very real concerns. We thought we could do that by leveraging the connectivity capabilities that the SYNC platform provides us with devices that we bring into the car, build into the car, or are beamed into the vehicle."

Ford vehicles already include certain built-in devices, such as air filtration systems and anti-microbial interior coatings, he notes. Next in development is a heart rate monitoring seat that would mesh heartbeats with other input such as speed, steering, gas. and pedal pushes to gauge the driver's stress level. Strumolo says that data can be used to create a "work load estimator."

"This estimate is used to gauge what we do with information that comes into the car," he says. "So if the work load estimate is deemed high, and a phone call comes in, then we could route that call directly to voicemail, assuming the call is paired through SYNC and SYNC has control of the phone."

Another application would be for devices such as a continuous glucose monitor, which would be paired wirelessly with the SYNC system so that a diabetic driver could ask verbally for his glucose levels and trends, or even the driving parent of a diabetic child could get the same data about one of their children in the back seat.

"Imagine it is winter time and you have a coat on. You are probably not going to want to grab in there to get the device and check your glucose levels. We certainly don't want you to do that. We want you to keep your eyes on the road and hands on the wheel. So most likely drivers would not check. With this capability, checking would be very easy to do," Strumolo says.

A final category of health-related data is beamed-in information, which could include things like smog alerts that could guide a navigation system around areas of high smog. Or for allergy sufferers, data on higher levels of pollen could automatically turn on the recirculating mode of the AC system rather than bring in pollen-laden fresh air.

"With it all we think we can create something we call 'The car that cares.' It knows your condition. It is concerned with and uses information that you bring in, you beam in, or is information that is available through the inside of the car to help you during your drive. It is concerned with your daily safety, not just making sure you are secure if you get in an accident," he says.

Speaking of accidents, aren't heart rate monitors, glucose meters, and allergy alerts just more distraction for drivers? Ford does not think so.

A vehicle with health devices and data "is not adding any screens. All the information would be communicated verbally. It does not want you to look at the device. We are working carefully to make sure that when information is communicated that it is communicated properly and in a fashion that keeps your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel," Strumolo says.

Any data gathered is instantaneous "vapor data" and is not stored, he says. "One thing we want to make sure is that the car is not turned into a medical device," he says. "The car is, in essence, a secondary display for some information that may be coming in through other means, either on a device that you wear or information that is beamed in from the cloud."

Automakers think there is a play here for a simple reason: Americans spend way too much time in their cars. Strumolo cites data from the Department of Transportation that Americans spend 500 million commuter hours a week in their cars, and that health and wellness apps are the third-fastest growing sector for wireless tools. Ford is counting on the intersection of those two data points to spell demand for Americans to turn their cars into an extension of their health lives, much as they have for entertainment.

Will it work? I am not so sure. Healthcare professionals know how difficult it is to engage people in actively monitoring their health in the best of circumstances. But in the big picture, this is just the start of a lot of other industries imagining how they can gather, use, and communicate health and wellness data back to the consumer.

Whether my mechanic can figure out how to install the dang thing is less certain.