For patients, wearable computers will be as common as filling a prescription

It's one thing to wear a bracelet that measures your rates of activity. But from a medical perspective, it's quite another order of magnitude to constantly measure your body temperature, down to a percent of a degree. Precision thermometry of the skin, along with other measurements, can provide clinically relevant information about cardiovascular health, cognitive state, malignancy and many other important aspects of human physiology. Scientists at the University of Illinois have created an ultrathin, almost tattoo-like sensor that offers clinicians real-time body temperature information. As this technology becomes cheaper and even more sophisticated, we are looking at a future in which it will be as normal to leave the doctor's office with a computer patch as it is to depart with a prescription.