This
I’m not opposed to subscription services as a rule,
But continuing to have to pay for a service to be able
To use something I’ve embedded inside my body has a very different vibe
Insert repo the genetic opera reference here
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That’s for sure!
But then… Either:
- You need to make the money in order to fund it… Which requires an alternative source of income, thus rendering the “subscription plan” unnecessary (given that a subscription plan requires that the product already exists, and in this case you need the money before said product comes to fruition)
or…
- You have the money, invest it into making the product, and then need to make the money back with profit from the product.
But then would it make sense to invest so heavily into a product just to drive it down with a business model that will yield diminished returns?
I mean… if you charge a subscription for an implant, you’ll probably cut the available audience to a tenth.
There are alternatives. Not necessarily easy ones…
And here I’m not saying this because “I think charging money is wrong! mehmehmeh”… this is just a rational thought abscent of judgement:
When trying to get people to adopt the use an implant, you need to overcome a huge societal barrier.
So you need to make it so that an implant feels like a better option!
Then let’s go to the classic “if A = B, and B = C…”
- A: for a regular joe, having a needle pushed in, even for absolutely free, already feels worse than having a thermometer at home
- B: for the same regular joe, paying £1 for a thermometer is infinitely better than paying £5 a month for a phone app that can read your temperature, even if there’s no implant involved.
and then you tell me you believe that the same average joe would rather pay £5 a month AND shove an implant in itself instead of having a thermomether at home?
We need to make it easier, but that model sounds to me like adding hurdles to the general public instead!
ps: “you” used here is a “generic you”, not specifically you, @Satur9 .
This gives Wojtek money, but does not necessarily help the implants to gain adoption.
Actually, if that turns out to be Vaporware (i.e. it gets funding but fails to deliver), it opens a precedent for investors to run away from anything implant-related, and gives more fuel to the diffamatory media to bring this whole community down.
And a PS:
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That’s the problem.
Talking about implants in general, to reach customers beyond this community, it just has to fulfill a need those people have (or create a new need and fulfill that afterwards - but for that way, you already need quite a publicity).
I have a friend who’s happy with bodmods or shoving needles inside his body, and he’s totally curious about my implants - but he’s actually one of the “why shouldn’t I just use a thermometer”-people. But he totally loves how I can open my door with my xEM - that’s something he would do in an instant, if he would own the locks or the door to his home. So he finds it completely reasonable to get poked just to never lose your keys again, but not for measuring temperature because there are so many easier ways.
I think payment is something where you could reach a really broad audience, just because it’s so convenient to just pay “with a wave of your hand”, but that’s possibly a completely different audience than those people who need (!) medical implants for glucose monitoring etc. I’m just not sure if it’s a good idea to mix those two things together.
Regarding all this subscription-stuff - I think @Eyeux already said it all and made very good points about that. It’s not about the money in itself. This community happily founded the Titan, and I think several people here would be absolutely willing to fund another (working) interesting new implant (a glassy with lots of sensors and possibly payment? Count me in!). But it’s incredibly frustrating to “buy” something just to have it altered again by the company that still “owns” it. This applies to online gaming, apps and tons of other things, and of course it feels a lot worse when said “thing” is inside your body.
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That’s the problem with payment solutions. Although it should be possible to have working NDEF and access to the sensors without relying on proprietary apps.
Always glad to see you active @Coma !!
And great points!
I think that is the one use case nearly everyone I talk to would gladly take an implant for!
Except that it also requires swapping your house door and, as you also pointed out, not everyone owns their own locks.
Yet this is a great example of something people don’t need, but they do like enough to invest money in and get implanted.
Then I look around and see a arguments like this being used everywhere: “people are ok with medical implants like peacemakers, so they will accept with an implant that has medical value”.
I’m sorry but that’s just faulty logic.
it’s not that “people are open to medical implants such as a pacemaker”.
That input should read “people accept implants that can save or extend your life”.
If we don’t make that distinction we might end up investing loads into making a new “medical implant” that becomes a flop. Because ultimately “being a medical implant” has no impact into how much the general public will want it or not.
Now, I feel like we glossed over this:
Should? Yes. As in… it is possible to develop an implant that spews readable data…
Would?
Well, if we’re talking about Walletmed, it is clear it will not.
In the video they mention “Step 4: Sending the raw data back to smartphone” and then the dealbreaker, which is only spoken: “where AI powered algorithms…”
That “step 5” makes it so that the raw data is clearly unusable if it needs to be extrapolated by an AI/Machine Learning model. Which also enshrouds the implant into a whole extra layer of dodgy.
And to be clear about that - I don’t want my medical data processed by some sort of AI or program if that’s not even neccessary. I can interpret my temperature, blood pressure, glucose levels etc. all by myself if I want to. It’s not that difficult… so the AI is only used to make the implant unusable by anyone not willing to use the app, and that’s a total dealbreaker for me.
Or maybe even those implants that make stuff more convenient. So glucose monitoring might be interesting; for people who need it. Same with blood pressure or whatever else can be monitored. Problem might be, are there enough people who need all those sensors at once?
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It’s more this (it’s necessary because the raw data needs to be processed on some kind of model to be useable)
Than this. It’s entirely possible and likely that a company will do it to obscure the data, but from a technical standpoint the fact remains that the data needs to be processed somehow. The sensor components don’t just spit out “heart rate: x, glucose: y”. You need to do a bunch of backend processing to make that data useable (not for temperature, but you get the point). This often involves mapping the sensor values against known values from a medical device in a large dataset, and training a machine learning algorithm to perform “sensor fusion” (ooh aah) and make the data accurate, not just precise.
The suggestion of having the raw data be spat out from the implant means that users could engineer their own means of processing the data, create their own dataset, and their own model. It would be a lot of work, especially for a few people as a labor of love. It also probably wouldn’t be as accurate or reliable as the one made by the company. That’s what I was implying earlier in the thread.
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Before I jump into the important bit…
If that’s the case, then I don’t think that would “fix” the issue of an implant being unusable without a proprietary app.
Because unless the data is workable directly, then you need to build an AI/ML/Comparative model… which requires large amounts of data that an individual cannot have access to. Therefore rendering it unusable no matter how good an engineer the user is.
Now back to the topic:
It might also be there because the implant in itself isn’t able to get an accurate reading.
As in… judging by the techniques mentioned in the video, I can foresee that a myriad of factors ranging from where you place the chip, user’s age… all the way to skin colour will have a significant impact in the readings.
And since there are both technical and logistical issues to input these into each user’s implant, one easy way out is to make an app that over a time period of matching the readings against a large data pool, can infer said user’s “variables” and then use that to “adjust”, “translate” and “interpret” the sensor data into something usable.
But… it goes far beyond 
This means that
- your medical data, often viewed as “private and sensitive”…
- will invariably end up “at the hands of a microchipping company”
I mean… this is pretty literally turning into reality one of the big arguments of the anti-chippers!
I can already see the newspapers headlines “microchips harvest personal data”… 
I know it’s not exactly like that.
I know it’s more complex…
But I cannot ignore how people might read into this just because “they would be wrong”.
And this is just another of the many reasons why this particular project (Walletmed) gives me the 's’hills.
it has “backfire” written all over it. 
I tried that already. Not really an implant. But it’s working fine.
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Do you feel it at all when moving or is it so small you don’t notice it? (The needle thingy) Does it feel like a splinter?
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No, you don’t feel the needle. It’s very flexible. You don’t feel pain either when the injector pushes it into the skin.
The only thing you can feel is the adhesive for the emettor that plugs into the needle assembly. It’s not painful but you can feel it when moving the arm.
You must be extra cautious when removing clothes though.
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Can’t wait for this fashion to become mainstream…
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Its probably common, but nobody post it on the internet. 
I’ve only seen one YouTuber dress like this.
Interesting and kinda related to this topic so I thought I would add it here for those who are not familiar with glucose testing :
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Freestyle Libre 3 is not the only one:
Eversense XL goes into the same direction
But its to remember that this is not a measurement of the bloodsuggar.
This stuff gets it out of the dermal tissue. The measurement you get from
there can be 5 up to 25min behind the bloodsuggar, especially after eating
or intensiv sports.
That is the reason you need some kind of AI to show you a trend where the
measurement will go to in the near future.
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