Auto health checks for liars.
Story: Mug Punter It looks like George Orwell’s Big Brother is being slowly replaced by something far worse – Big Mother. It was bad enough back in the old days, when your mother wouldn’t let you step outside the door without checking you’d cleaned your teeth, scraped under your fingernails (for those of us who hadn’t chewed them to extinction) and put on clean undies in case you got hit by a bus. This last item on the checklist was always a bit puzzling, and garnered more childhood fears than any number of stories of the monster under the bed or boogie man in the cupboard – the unreasonable terror of being left maimed on the side of the road, flattened by an errant bus, condemned to die after the emergency crew discovered during CPR that your boxers weren’t freshly laundered and in disgust ejected you from the ambulance. We were mostly covered entirely in germs the whole time anyway (soiled underwear aside). My mother used to lick the corner of her hanky and clean my face – that’s where the germs came from, plus enough nicotine to give an elephant cancer. I have to admit, somehow I survived, so there must have been unseen medical or scientific benefits involved that Wetwipes can’t achieve. Today’s mums can safely leave their handkerchiefs unlicked and stay focused on Family Feud, because health insurers are taking over the role of Big Mother and through the wonders of digital signage will be haranguing us about our extra weight, poor diet, bad habits and lack of exercise. Collectively, combining the Baby Boomers, X and Y Generations – and whatever comes next – we’ve become the Slob Generation and health insurers want to do something about it. This strikes me as weird, because last thing you’d expect health insurers to want is a healthy society. Healthy people don’t need health insurance. By promoting herbal tea and quinoa, health insurers are essentially shooting themselves in the foot – which, incidentally, won’t be covered cos it’s self-inflicted. As far as business models go, this one’s looking a bit anaemic. [Or they’re actually luring a bigger chunk of the healthier people to their business who pay the premiums and don’t claim… just sayin’ — Ed.] Insurance bean-counters needn’t worry. This is digital signage we’re talking about, which means interaction, connectivity and real-time input from the target audience. The cunning plan is to install touchscreen information terminals and self-help kiosks where people are encouraged voluntarily input personal statistics and answer health questionnaires. In other words, we’re expected to provide most, if not all, of the medical data that will determine whether or not we are a pathetic, unhealthy slob in need of saving from your own appalling lifestyle. You know what? That’s never going to happen. Who answers health questions properly? Ask any smoker who burns through a pack a day how much they smoke and the answer will be “only occasionally and only when I have a beer”. Quiz someone who downs a bottle of Jim Beam a night and they’ll only ever have “just a couple of quiet ones”. The truth is, honesty is in short supply here. For example, my wife wants me to lose weight – she claims higher altruistic motives (avoiding Death), but I suspect she’s simply making unfair comparisons during the football season between myself and the entire Fremantle Dockers roster (who’d she’d marry at the drop of a Sherrin, if it was legal). Now, my weight has little to do with the figure displayed by our bathroom scales every morning. Instead, it’s a complicated formula comprising how much I supposedly weigh, minus any cups of tea I’ve so far consumed, and I’m also allowed to take into consideration any weighty material still inside my body from the previous evening’s activities that my digestive system has failed to process due to being asleep – your entire body stops functioning while you’re sleeping, I read this on the interweb. So this is a negative figure included in the calculation, too. The final result is how much I really weigh, not the stupid LCD readout on the scales which represents my mass on planet Earth. I seriously doubt that modern digital signage, regardless of how cleverly programmed it is, can accurately process the kind of information Generation Slob will input, if it’s left entirely up to us to provide it. What’s really required is the development of technology such as Fat Recognition software and perhaps Food Stain Recognition capability that will detect fast food stains on your shirt. They could employ lie detector equipment built into the touchscreen kiosks and flash up pictures of frosty pints of beer and Cuban cigars to measure your true bad habit involvement. After adding this information to your fudged medical statistics you’ve voluntarily entered, the digital signage will display in ultra high resolution your genuine Generation Slob rating and health status according to Big Mother. She won’t be pleased. Alarm bells will ring and you’ll probably get a very nasty shock indeed – maybe even a fatal one. Make sure you’re wearing clean undies.
Mug Punter’s curmudgeonly carping does not necessarily reflect the views of DigitalSignage. If you have a differing view contact the editor Chris Holder on chris@dsmag.com.au