PBS高端访谈:实时健康数据会给电子消费者带来健康生活吗?

 　　JUDY WOODRUFF: More than 100,000 people turned out for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, the annual showcase for the latest in technology, devices and high-end toys.

　　One of the big themes was the rising interest in health tech.

　　Our science correspondent, Miles O'Brien, was there to explore the potential benefits and caveats¹ around all of this.

　　His report is part of our Breakthroughs series on invention and innovation.

　　MILES O'BRIEN: Wearing your heart on your sleeve is taking on a whole new meaning.

　　At the 2016 pilgrimage to Las Vegas for gadget² geeks, CES, wearable health tracking devices broke into full stride, winning much more than a bit of flashy floor space and heated hype. Of course, for the growing legions of you keeping score at home on your devices, this is likely old data.

　　实时健康数据会给电子消费者带来健康生活吗?

　　WOODY SCAL, Chief Business Officer, Fitbit: What is happening is, people are taking more responsibility for their health and fitness. They're realizing that health and fitness isn't just popping a pill. It's actually what they do that can really add up to a healthy life.

　　MILES O'BRIEN: Woody Scal is the chief business officer at market leader Fitbit, a $4 billion company based in San Francisco that began selling glorified³ pedometers in 2007.

　　WOODY SCAL: Seven years ago, when you talked about fitness electronics, people thought about products for triathletes. They didn't realize that these products could really address the needs of everyday people.

　　MILES O'BRIEN: An estimated 500 million people worldwide apparently⁴ now feel the need to copiously⁵ log their steps, leaps, strokes and spins, while recording⁶ their breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, sleep patterns and food intake⁷, just to name a few, and then, of course, brag⁸ about it online.

　　LINDSEY TURRENTINE, Editor in Chief, CNET: I think humans have always been completely narcissistic⁹. That has not changed. The technology has given us a constant virtual mirror.

　　MILES O'BRIEN: Lindsey Turrentine is a sporadic¹⁰ fitness logger and the editor in chief of CNET.com, where tracking the technology of fitness tracking has become a big, important beat.

　　LINDSEY TURRENTINE: We're always checking on ourselves constantly. We're checking on whether people have responded to us, and then we're also checking to see whether our bodies have responded to what we're doing. It's just another way to look at ourselves.

　　MILES O'BRIEN: But there is more than the psychology¹¹ of self-obsession driving this sector¹² to grow more than 200 percent a year. There's a perfect storm of technological¹³ advances as well. Sensors¹⁵ are rapidly shrinking in size and cost. Communications between devices has improved. And so has battery life.

　　And, of course, none of it could happen without the ubiquity of smartphones, our mobile switchboard for all things technological. It's a ripe convergence for the big players upstairs and the upstarts in the basement as well.

　　That's where we found Peter Neilson, CEO of a Denver start-up called femtoScale.

　　It seems like there's no limit to the amount of data people want to get. Right? Would you agree with that? What's going on?

　　PETER NEILSON, CEO, femtoScale: And wearables…MILES O'BRIEN: Yes.

　　PETER NEILSON: … are blowing up. That's half of CES this year looks like its wearable, trying to compute¹⁶ everything.

　　MILES O'BRIEN: Neilson's company is developing a portable and eventually wearable sensor¹⁴ that can provide real-time readings of air quality by weighing airborne particles much too small to see. The scale is just barely visible.

　　I needed a jeweler's magnifying glass to see it.

　　PETER NEILSON: What we're really trying to do is look at, not just health care, but wellness. Can we use all this data we can get from all sorts of different things, not only to keep people healthy once they're in the hospital, but prevent them from getting sick in the first place?

　　MILES O'BRIEN: San Jose-based Stratio has shrunk a spectrometer down to palm size. The device shines a bright light on food and medicine to determine if they are what they purport¹⁷ to be.

　　In this demonstration¹⁸, CEO Jae Hyung Lee compared counterfeit¹⁹, generic²⁰ and genuine Viagra to the fingerprint-like spectroscopic pattern of the real McCoy. It was instantly obvious which were the impostors.

　　JAE HYUNG LEE, CEO, Stratio: So far, people were just interested themselves, but now they want to know more about what they're eating. They want to know what they're buying. They want to know what's going on around them.

　　MILES O'BRIEN: Clearly, exercise and nutrition tracking alone are not enough to satisfy entrepreneurs or consumers in the health tracking space.

　　Kaustubh Kale is CEO of a Boca Raton start-up called AventuSoft. They are developing a wearable heart monitor and electrocardiogram.

　　KAUSTUBH KALE, CEO, AventuSoft: There's not a pushback anymore. People are already aware of Fitbit or any of the other wearables, so they're already accepting these new technologies. And now, as the technology improves, you can now push it into the medical grid²¹ domain²².

　　MILES O'BRIEN: It's an interesting development. When you think about it, it really is no less than the democratization of medicine, isn't it?

　　KAUSTUBH KALE: Absolutely, yes. You're putting the power in the consumer's hands, and so they can get the data whenever they need, where they need it and with the accuracy that the doctor needs.

　　MILES O'BRIEN: This is where the government steps in. In early 2015, the Food and Drug Administration released a document offering guidance to industry and its own staff on regulating mobile medical applications, declaring it will only regulate apps that are medical devices and whose functionality could pose a risk to a patient's safety if the mobile app were to not function as intended.

　　BAKUL PATEL, Food and Drug Administration: So, the risk to patients ranges from misdiagnosis, delay in diagnosis²³, or when you get into the discussion of false positives and false negatives, and then you have therapeutic²⁴ devices that can actually harm people.

　　MILES O'BRIEN: Bakul Patel is associate center director for digital health at FDA.

　　BAKUL PATEL: There are standards of what an EKG machine — how it should capture, what kind of wave forms, how it should be managing the signals that comes out of your body and displaying it. Those are all standards written — written for that.

　　If you're going to be in the market as an EKG machine, doctors better rely on them, and we ask for testing to happen, so they can actually make the same sort of diagnosis and treatment decisions.

　　MILES O'BRIEN: The pull of diagnostic tools out of the doctor's toolbox and into our pockets, our ears and onto our wrists is a revolution seed in part by this man, Larry Smarr.

　　A scientist and professor at the University of California, San Diego, he used the video wall at the school's Qualcomm Institute to illustrate²⁵ the power of what's called the quantified self.

　　LARRY SMARR, University of California, San Diego: Big data, as it's called. And this is about me. Every one of the points on these graphs are a different blood test or a stool test in which I got a data point over a decade.

　　MILES O'BRIEN: Dr. Smarr began his fantastic data voyage back in 2000 with a desire to lose some weight. And so his self-prescribed testing began. He never looked back, and, before long, he spotted²⁶ trouble. His self-diagnosis, Crohn's disease.

　　So, he brought the data to his doctor, who said:

　　LARRY SMARR: If you don't have symptoms, why are you here? I said, because I got data. And he said, well, that's not helpful. And so I realized, as a lifetime scientist, that the practice of medicine and the practice of science, while they overlap²⁷ sometimes, are generally different.

　　MILES O'BRIEN: So, he fired that doctor and found another. Indeed, so many people generating so much diagnostic data may sound like a prescription²⁸ for a lot of bad diagnoses, unneeded anxiety or even an epidemic²⁹ of hypochondria.

　　LINDSEY TURRENTINE: There is such a thing as too much data if you can't deal with the data.

　　If you don't have software that will help you interpret the data in a smart and reliable way, or if you get overwhelmed and frustrated³⁰ and you don't know how to pick it out of the big needle in a haystack sort of data pile that's building up on your phone, then it's too much data. But it's sort of up to you and how much you can handle.

　　MILES O'BRIEN: But a giant cloud of real-time data, really big data, aggregated³¹, analyzed³² and compared with artificial intelligence, could lead to stunning³³ breakthroughs in preventive medicine.

　　WOODY SCAL: Where you can figure out, how has this kind of signal been correlated with other things that have happened among a broader set of people. Someday, could you get an early alert about an impending³⁴ heart event? Yes, I believe you can. I believe you will.

　　MILES O'BRIEN: There may be rough spots and silliness along the way, but there is no stopping the free market experiment to give us all more knowledge and more power managing our own well-being³⁵.

　　Miles O'Brien, the PBS NewsHour, Las Vegas.

 

1 caveats   

警告

参考例句：

• I would offer a caveat for those who want to join me in the dual calling. 为防止发生误解，我想对那些想要步我后尘的人提出警告。 来自辞典例句
• As I have written before, that's quite a caveat. 正如我以前所写，那确实是个警告。 来自互联网

2 gadget   

n.小巧的机械，精巧的装置，小玩意儿

参考例句：

• This gadget isn't much good.这小机械没什么用处。
• She has invented a nifty little gadget for undoing stubborn nuts and bolts.她发明了一种灵巧的小工具用来松开紧固的螺母和螺栓。

3 glorified   

美其名的，变荣耀的

参考例句：

• The restaurant was no more than a glorified fast-food cafe. 这地方美其名曰餐馆，其实只不过是个快餐店而已。
• The author glorified the life of the peasants. 那个作者赞美了农民的生活。

4 apparently   

adv.显然地；表面上，似乎

参考例句：

• An apparently blind alley leads suddenly into an open space.山穷水尽，豁然开朗。
• He was apparently much surprised at the news.他对那个消息显然感到十分惊异。

5 copiously   

adv.丰富地，充裕地

参考例句：

• She leant forward and vomited copiously on the floor. 她向前一俯，哇的一声吐了一地。 来自英汉文学
• This well-organized, unified course copiously illustrated, amply cross-referenced, and fully indexed. 这条组织完善，统一的课程丰富地被说明，丰富地被相互参照和充分地被标注。 来自互联网

6 recording   

n.录音，记录

参考例句：

• How long will the recording of the song take?录下这首歌得花多少时间？
• I want to play you a recording of the rehearsal.我想给你放一下彩排的录像。

7 intake   

n.吸入，纳入；进气口，入口

参考例句：

• Reduce your salt intake.减少盐的摄入量。
• There was a horrified intake of breath from every child.所有的孩子都害怕地倒抽了一口凉气。

8 brag   

v./n.吹牛，自夸；adj.第一流的

参考例句：

• He made brag of his skill.他夸耀自己技术高明。
• His wealth is his brag.他夸张他的财富。

9 narcissistic   

adj.自我陶醉的，自恋的，自我崇拜的

参考例句：

• In the modern vocabulary, it was narcissistic. 用时髦话说，这是一种自我陶醉狂。 来自辞典例句
• This is our Nielaoshi, a dwarf has also grown narcissistic teachers. 这就是我们的倪老师，一个长得又矮又自恋的老师。 来自互联网

10 sporadic   

adj.偶尔发生的 [反]regular；分散的

参考例句：

• The sound of sporadic shooting could still be heard.仍能听见零星的枪声。
• You know this better than I.I received only sporadic news about it.你们比我更清楚，而我听到的只是零星消息。

11 psychology   

n.心理，心理学，心理状态

参考例句：

• She has a background in child psychology.她受过儿童心理学的教育。
• He studied philosophy and psychology at Cambridge.他在剑桥大学学习哲学和心理学。

12 sector   

n.部门，部分；防御地段，防区；扇形

参考例句：

• The export sector will aid the economic recovery. 出口产业将促进经济复苏。
• The enemy have attacked the British sector.敌人已进攻英国防区。

13 technological   

adj.技术的；工艺的

参考例句：

• A successful company must keep up with the pace of technological change.一家成功的公司必须得跟上技术变革的步伐。
• Today,the pace of life is increasing with technological advancements.当今， 随着科技进步，生活节奏不断增快。

14 sensor   

n.传感器，探测设备，感觉器（官）

参考例句：

• The temperature sensor is enclosed in a protective well.温度传感器密封在保护套管中。
• He plugged the sensor into a outlet.他把传感器插进电源插座。

15 sensors   

n.传感器，灵敏元件( sensor的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• There were more than 2000 sensors here. 这里装有两千多个灵敏元件。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Significant changes have been noted where sensors were exposed to trichloride. 当传感器暴露在三氯化物中时，有很大变化。 来自辞典例句

16 compute   

v./n.计算，估计

参考例句：

• I compute my losses at 500 dollars.我估计我的损失有五百元。
• The losses caused by the floods were beyond compute.洪水造成的损失难以估量。

17 purport   

n.意义，要旨，大要；v.意味著，做为...要旨，要领是...

参考例句：

• Many theories purport to explain growth in terms of a single cause.许多理论都标榜以单一的原因解释生长。
• Her letter may purport her forthcoming arrival.她的来信可能意味着她快要到了。

18 demonstration   

n.表明，示范，论证，示威

参考例句：

• His new book is a demonstration of his patriotism.他写的新书是他的爱国精神的证明。
• He gave a demonstration of the new technique then and there.他当场表演了这种新的操作方法。

19 counterfeit   

vt.伪造，仿造；adj.伪造的，假冒的

参考例句：

• It is a crime to counterfeit money.伪造货币是犯罪行为。
• The painting looked old but was a recent counterfeit.这幅画看上去年代久远，实际是最近的一幅赝品。

20 generic   

adj.一般的，普通的，共有的

参考例句：

• I usually buy generic clothes instead of name brands.我通常买普通的衣服，不买名牌。
• The generic woman appears to have an extraordinary faculty for swallowing the individual.一般妇女在婚后似乎有特别突出的抑制个性的能力。

21 grid   

n.高压输电线路网；地图坐标方格；格栅

参考例句：

• In this application,the carrier is used to encapsulate the grid.在这种情况下，要用载体把格栅密封起来。
• Modern gauges consist of metal foil in the form of a grid.现代应变仪则由网格形式的金属片组成。

22 domain   

n.(活动等)领域，范围；领地，势力范围

参考例句：

• This information should be in the public domain.这一消息应该为公众所知。
• This question comes into the domain of philosophy.这一问题属于哲学范畴。

23 diagnosis   

n.诊断，诊断结果，调查分析，判断

参考例句：

• His symptoms gave no obvious pointer to a possible diagnosis.他的症状无法作出明确的诊断。
• The engineer made a complete diagnosis of the bridge's collapse.工程师对桥的倒塌做一次彻底的调查分析。

24 therapeutic   

adj.治疗的，起治疗作用的；对身心健康有益的

参考例句：

• Therapeutic measures were selected to fit the patient.选择治疗措施以适应病人的需要。
• When I was sad,music had a therapeutic effect.我悲伤的时候，音乐有治疗效力。

25 illustrate   

v.举例说明，阐明；图解，加插图

参考例句：

• The company's bank statements illustrate its success.这家公司的银行报表说明了它的成功。
• This diagram will illustrate what I mean.这个图表可说明我的意思。

26 spotted   

adj.有斑点的，斑纹的，弄污了的

参考例句：

• The milkman selected the spotted cows,from among a herd of two hundred.牛奶商从一群200头牛中选出有斑点的牛。
• Sam's shop stocks short spotted socks.山姆的商店屯积了有斑点的短袜。

27 overlap   

v.重叠，与…交叠；n.重叠

参考例句：

• The overlap between the jacket and the trousers is not good.夹克和裤子重叠的部分不好看。
• Tiles overlap each other.屋瓦相互叠盖。

28 prescription   

n.处方，开药；指示，规定

参考例句：

• The physician made a prescription against sea- sickness for him.医生给他开了个治晕船的药方。
• The drug is available on prescription only.这种药只能凭处方购买。

29 epidemic   

n.流行病；盛行；adj.流行性的，流传极广的

参考例句：

• That kind of epidemic disease has long been stamped out.那种传染病早已绝迹。
• The authorities tried to localise the epidemic.当局试图把流行病限制在局部范围。

30 frustrated   

adj.挫败的，失意的，泄气的v.使不成功( frustrate的过去式和过去分词 )；挫败；使受挫折；令人沮丧

参考例句：

• It's very easy to get frustrated in this job. 这个工作很容易令人懊恼。
• The bad weather frustrated all our hopes of going out. 恶劣的天气破坏了我们出行的愿望。 来自《简明英汉词典》

31 aggregated   

a.聚合的，合计的

参考例句：

• He aggregated her to a political party. 他吸收她参加一政党。
• The audiences aggregated a million people. 观众总数达100万人。

32 analyzed   

v.分析( analyze的过去式和过去分词 )；分解；解释；对…进行心理分析

参考例句：

• The doctors analyzed the blood sample for anemia. 医生们分析了贫血的血样。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The young man did not analyze the process of his captivation and enrapturement, for love to him was a mystery and could not be analyzed. 这年轻人没有分析自己蛊惑著迷的过程，因为对他来说，爱是个不可分析的迷。 来自《简明英汉词典》

33 stunning   

adj.极好的；使人晕倒的

参考例句：

• His plays are distinguished only by their stunning mediocrity.他的戏剧与众不同之处就是平凡得出奇。
• The finished effect was absolutely stunning.完工后的效果非常美。

34 impending   

a.imminent, about to come or happen

参考例句：

• Against a background of impending famine, heavy fighting took place. 即将发生饥荒之时，严重的战乱爆发了。
• The king convoke parliament to cope with the impending danger. 国王召开国会以应付迫近眉睫的危险。

35 well-being   

n.安康，安乐，幸福

参考例句：

• He always has the well-being of the masses at heart.他总是把群众的疾苦挂在心上。
• My concern for their well-being was misunderstood as interference.我关心他们的幸福，却被误解为多管闲事。