Medical Alert (RF)ID Bracelet

As background for her talk about RFID and art at iMAL’s RFID workshop a couple weeks ago in Brussels, Régine Debatty conducted 6 interviews with artists and experts about their experience with the technology, published here.

One of our favorites was Doria Fan’s Medical Alert (RF)ID Bracelet, a handmade bracelet with an embedded RFID tag. When the tag is read, it links the patient to his or her online medical history and automatically places a call to their emergency contact. Fan paid as much attention to the form of the bracelet as to its function. She says:

Privacy, surveillance — those are real concerns [but] I was more interested in issues of self-expression and identity, particularly in situations where the user has no choice in wearing a technology, i.e. for medical (assistive technologies be it for a physical or mental disability, etc.), safety, utilitarian reasons, where I find issues of self-identity much more pressing. A person’s health affects not only themselves, but the people around them, so I thought it was important that this be a true networked object. …

Part of reason medical ID bracelets, and other “utilitarian” things out there are underused, is because they don’t address some of the basic needs, such as self-expression and identity, of the person its designed for. Emotional, visceral, psychological needs are not to be underestimated in the success of a product or experience. While making it, I was just as interested in design of the bracelet than the technology (RFID, Asterisk) behind it. One of my requirements for this project is that bracelets had to be attractive.

Considering that one of the major problems in healthcare is compliance, Fan has the right idea–design is just as important as technology. Some others we liked were:

• iTea, an uncanny tea table that spills “facts” of your own life on its surface, debuted at the Picnic conference in Amsterdam last September. By dropping your conference Tag in an old porcelain tea cup, the system will search the internet for data about you. The information will start to appear on a flat projection underneath the cup. Sentences will appear as ripples and move out towards the edges of the center.

• Josh Klein and his wife made a site, OwnYourStuff, that enables them to track everything they own.

• Paula Roush explored the sonic properties of RFID with Arphield Recordings, a project documenting impromptu arphid (rfid) sound performances produced by people scanning their Oyster Cards in the daily routine of access control to the London tube stations.

[via We Make Money Not Art]