Ford Developing Wireless Health Apps for Motorists on the Go

K. Venkatesh Prasad has been working in Detroit for the past five years on an innovation that could be described as the next big crazy idea that might just work.

As the senior technical leader in vehicle design and infotronics at Ford Research & Innovation, Prasad oversees development of voice-activated apps and wireless services that would enable motorists to monitor their own health and chronic illnesses on the road.

During a panel discussion earlier this week at the Wireless Health 2011 Academic and Research Conference in San Diego, Prasad said development of in-car health and wellness technology is part of a broader effort to expand the capabilities of Ford’s SYNC in-car connectivity system. “We were saying if all we did was connect the mobile phone to an online digital music player that it wouldn’t be enough,” Prasad told me.

Ford’s initiative remains mostly in the R&D stage. While the Dearborn, MI-based automaker is looking broadly—and literally—at mobile health, Prasad said, “We’re not trying so much to prove out specific examples. These are really research experiments and investigations.”

Still, the company demonstrated just how its in-car wireless health could work in a Kona blue metallic Ford Edge parked outside the conference. Using voice-recognition software much like the SYNC system and “MyFord Touch” features available in current models of the crossover SUV, the car’s automated voice offered pretend guidance to address a low-glucose reading.

K. Ventkatesh Prasad

Ford (NYSE: [[ticker:F]]) has been working with Fridley, MN-based Medtronic (NYSE: [[ticker:MDT]]) to develop a prototype wireless health system capable of connecting to a continuous glucose monitoring device Medtronic makes for people with diabetes. Ford’s SYNC system uses Bluetooth to connect with the monitoring device, which would share its monitoring data with the SYNC system, which could then query the driver (or a passenger) and offer advice if blood glucose levels are too low or too high.

Ford is developing a similar prototype that could gather online data about pollen levels and other allergens, combine it with GPS-based contextual information, and offer advice to motorists with allergies, asthma, colds, and other sensitivities.

The work at Ford these days, however, is focused mostly on

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.