Center for Future Health is here and now

L ast month the University launched its Center for Future Health, the mission of which is to create portable technologies for use by people in their own homes to prevent disease before it strikes. The center aims to make technology affordable and easy to use, so that the home, not a hospital or a doctor's office, becomes the location where patients maintain their health.

"We're developing new technology with the goal of shifting the focus of medicine from treating and curing patients to preventing disease," said Philippe Fauchet, center director. "There are groups left and right developing devices for individual applications, but we're talking about a fundamental change in the health care system. We will create new medical technology, but on a personal scale. It will be technology you can trust and use every day without being bothered."

The center is conducting about 20 research projects--including several with the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology--that involve engineers developing devices in collaboration with physicians, making sure the health care goals are realistic and appropriate. Most involve taking a new technology--such as pattern recognition, DNA computing, and artificial intelligence software--and using it as the seed of a low-cost, portable health care device. For instance, pattern and motion recognition software might be the basis of a "gait monitor" that would give early warning of a stroke, or the source of "memory glasses" to remind the elderly of the names of relatives.

University officials know of no other effort where the focus is on developing new technologies for everyday use by large numbers of people to prevent disease.