TALKING TECH

Hallelujah! My life may just have been saved by a bit of smart-home tech

This month, our happy-golucky columnist Duncan Bell has his life saved by a piece of tech. Good grief – what would we have done without his scribblings?

Had I not been tipped off by that bit of tech, I’d never have dreamed of burdening the doc

It’s easy to take tech’s life-changing advancements for granted. That’s because of the incremental way it usually advances.

Every day, we see ridiculous claims for new products that are, in most cases, the same as slightly older products, but with a marginally faster processor, or more pixels, or a case that’s ‘jet black’. Mmmmm, jet black.

Take a longer view, however, and tech’s key innovations – the internet, mobile devices and the subsequent interconnectivity of everything – have had effects as profound as the invention of electricity or the printing press.

I met my partner on the internet; we’ve been together eight years. I have a profound inability to read maps, and the sense of direction of a cardboard box. Doesn’t matter, thanks to Google Maps.

Entertainment-wise, I have access to just about every song ever, and soon every game and movie ever, too.

Perhaps most profound of all, I can now know exactly what the President of the United States is thinking at any

given second, even if I don’t want to. You’ve done all this too. Apart from meeting my partner online. I hope.

Now, tech may have done something new and amazing for me: prevented an early death.

Withings and I

Over the years, I’ve built up a little suite of connected things from French brand Withings. There’s a sleep sensor that goes in my bed that looks like it detects incontinence, but is to monitor snoozing. There’s a set of scales that tells me my weight and body-fat percentage. There’s a watch for counting steps.

I’m not sure this is stuff I’d pay for, as I’m already aware I walk and sleep. But as part of my job, I’m lucky enough to get sent it for nothing, so what the hell.

So my little suite of Withings things has grown, and the most recent addition was a blood-pressure reader. It’s like at the doctor’s, but far more techy looking, and with Bluetooth in it. You strap it on, hit a button on your phone and it inflates and does its thang.

That’s the theory, anyway. I just couldn’t get it to work. I gave it a few goes but it refused to take a reading, and I consigned it to the tech knacker’s yard which is my spare room.

However, in the run-up to Christmas, I started feeling like crap. This didn’t worry me unduly. I always assume guys my age generally feel like crap. That’s due to the end of carefree youth, and the dawning realisation that you’re unlikely to acheive immortality either through your work and deeds, or – my preference – through not dying.

One evening, I also found myself feeling stressed for no reason. Very,

very irritable, even by my standards; really struggling to concentrate. To put it in layman’s terms, like a heart attack waiting to happen.

Almost as a joke, I thought I’d give the techy blood-pressure thing one last try – either to put my mind at ease or to be able to tell my boyfriend, “See, I told you I was ill. Happy now?”

So I strapped it on, hit the button and thankfully, it worked this time.

Well, perhaps ‘thankfully’ isn’t quite the right word, as at this point a klaxon went off, a red light started flashing, and my phone blew up. Okay, that’s a lie, but the numbers were high. Way, way higher than they should be – I’d looked it up on the web. Of course.

This finding was immediate. When I went to my GP, I found that the NHS is rather less immediate, so I still have no idea what is wrong with me. High blood pressure is a condition in itself, but it’s also a possible symptom of all manner of things, from relatively trivial to, erm, not at all trivial.

The thing is, had I not been tipped off by that bit of tech, I would never have dreamed of burdening the doctor, quite possibly until I was literally at death’s door.

As an added bonus, I also got to wear the NHS’s equivalent ‘portable’ device for tracking blood pressure. This is a big, Walkman-like box that attaches to your belt – how chic! – with a fat, rubber tube that runs under your clothes, to an arm cuff that looks like a mental-hospital restraint. Not quite the funky, totally wireless consumer tech version.

This has been an eye-opener. When we can test ourselves at home for a range of conditions, that’ll be another one to chalk up to ‘truly world-changing’ rather than ‘comes in jet black’.