Constant bio-monitoring pilot launches in Seattle in March

Bio-monitoring has been commonplace since the advent of medicine. A typical doctor's visit might include checks on pulse, blood pressure, and blood and urine proteins. Small studies based on specific conditions such as cancer use bio-monitoring to track even small changes in vitals and proteins in body fluids, and knowing what kinds of changes occur with these diseases can help doctors diagnose them earlier. One program in the UK used electronic sensors to accurately detect chemical in urine that indicate bladder cancer, a process derived from cancer-sniffing dogs and a lot less painful than the alternative of regular doctor visits to have a tube inserted in the urethra to detect tumors. Now, a study in Seattle is tracking bioindicators in healthy subjects to see if the researchers can find early indicators of illness.

This study, which starts in March, is a little out of the ordinary for a few reasons:

1. The healthy people are the subjects rather than the controls. Usually studies like this look at bioindicators in people who have a particular condition like bladder cancer and compare their findings to those of healthy people to see where the difference is.
2. It seems to break multiple rules of standard experimentation. Not only are the healthy people not the controls, there are no controls. Everything else is blind and randomized. And participants receive feedback through the course of the study, which allows them to change how they eat, sleep, and otherwise go about their day. In a field that doesn't take well to multiple variables, this study sure has a lot of them.
3. With the multiple variables comes a very thorough assessment. It'd be one thing if they just tracked changes in the blood, but that's just one facet of this study. Each of the 100 participants will have their entire genome sequenced for both genetic and epigenetic markers, physical activity tracked, sleep patterns monitored, and bodily fluids (saliva, blood, urine, and feces) examined for proteins and other chemicals.

The results from the constant bio-monitoring will be uploaded to each participant's "cloud," allowing both participant and researcher to look at the changes over the nine-month period. It may seem a bit invasive to look at so much for so long, but I see it as a way to eliminate rogue variables because it's so comprehensive. Human bodies are crazily complex, and a study like this that covers so many factors could provide some very useful information, especially if it were expanded to cover a longer time or larger population.