The straps go around the chest.

The chest of a middle schooler.

A sweaty, pubescent middle schooler.

Running around in the hot sun.

Who is only beginning to understand about the need for personal hygiene.

Yeah. I don't want to keep a collection of those in the same building I work in either. Ew. I think that's an OSHA violation or something.

Ditto. I exercise with interest now that I have a set of trackable data from my HRM. Without one before, I was just running in circles. Now I'm running in circles with a goal... or something.

Anyway, they're fun. Worth the price if you really intend to improve your fitness.

I worked for Polar as a technical writer. Their HRMs are very neat. If they're using a basic model it's exactly what you describe.

The zippier models like the F10 actually will do fitness evaluations on your heart, though. They call it "OwnAge" and "OwnZone" and "Own-" whatever. Marketing, but a cool idea behind it.

Those ones do detect variations in rhythm and timings between beats. They take that information, plug it into an equation that accounts for BMI, age, recorded exercise history, and other factors, then spit out a number that helps you track the fitness of your heart. The idea is to give you a graph of the good your exercise is doing for you.

That's all interpreted by real time data coming in, though. They don't record a waveform for later examination or anything. Certainly not medically diagnostic. All you ever get to see are the averages as datapoints.

That's what you get for caring, Bruce. If you'd just practiced more neglect, everything would have turned out fine.

I'm betting it's not even that and it's just a heart rate monitor to improve the quality of aerobic exercise. I concur.

I worked as a technical writer for a place that made HRMs. We sold to pro athletes, gyms, personal trainers, Navy seals, fitness enthusiasts of every stripe... we even had a version of the product made especially for training race horses. It was pretty cool.

I was surprised at what a difference using one of those things made in my *own* ability to exercise. I'm an overweight writing nerd, but man: there's nothing like beeping, booping technology to get my interest. Using an HRM is like keeping score on a video game. Or playing the tomagotchi game with your body as the avatar. Or something.

Something fun and trackable, anyway.

The HRM went a long way toward getting me off my butt and dropping pounds because it provided metrics and feedback that I could understand and affect. That's more than my "hustle! hustle! hustle!" school coach ever managed to do.

All this being said: I doubt that the information on your kid is going to be recorded for more than 9 weeks, honestly. There are, like, serious LAWS about that information getting off campus, too. Anybody who is into selling kids' info to Nefarious Businesses Incorporated is going to have access to a lot more dirt than just a weird blip on your child's HRM.

That HRM, by the way, is certainly *not* medically diagnostic in quality. I'd be surprised if it did more than note the heart rate at 1 second intervals and track the changes over time. It *might* try to estimate a general sense of fitness on the heart, but it will, at best, give you a meaningless number on a scale from "is this thing on?" to "cybernetically enhanced athlete trained atop the Himalayas from birth."

No need to worry. The poster's school's coach is probably just trying to do a great job at keeping the kids in his care interested in physical fitness. I applaud him/her for it.

Nope. It honestly IS the first outage I've heard of.

Admittedly, I have my head in the sand a lot. But I don't lie about it afterward. :)

Or someone will get congratulated and promoted. It depends on the response to diagnose and fix the issue, whatever it is. Major outages aren't always the fault of some apocryphal guy asleep at the switch.

No need to get cocky, kid.

I've used Google mail for years. This is the first outage I've heard of, and it hasn't even affected me. I can tell you the in-house exchange server at my company has caused for more trouble than this for our employees in the past 8 months.

I work IT at a home nursing business, and I get work tickets submitted all the time. The nurses and office coordinators use software that -- don't ask me why -- requires them to use all capital letters when entering patient visit notes and ordering medications. They leave the CAPS LOCK key on all the time as part of their professional work, and are so used to it that it doesn't stand out when they use it in other contexts.

You learn to live with it.

HIPAA makes no distinction between a compliance consultant and an IT consultant. If you're getting paid to work on a project related to health care and patient information, HIPAA requires you to be aware of the implications of information transmission.

That's the *whole point of the law that is HIPAA.*

Giving legal advice is one thing. Bringing attention to areas of your expertise that carry implications for HIPAA is another. IT professionals know about how technology affects the flow of information. We have a responsibility to our employers to put that knowledge to use on their behalf.

That's one way to frame the argument, and it's a good one.

I'd stress to them that HIPAA PHI standards require the company -- AKA your bosses -- to be able to vouch for the security of the entire pipeline of information flow. It's not an issue of "they're not interested" or "the chances are low." It's an issue of minimizing the holes in the pipeline.

Google does not offer anything like PHI-compatible security. They are a big hole in the secuirty, whatever the chances or interest are. One could argue that the world's largest indexer of information, who makes the results of those indexes freely available to the public, is the antithesis of security.

If your bosses are serious about health care, they're not going to be idiots about it. (They may chose to be idiots about other things. Probably not this.)

Exactly right. The company that made LoJack lobbied for the feature to be installed, but they want you to pay for it to be activated. If you don't give them money, it's dormant.

Now, if somebody hacked or appropriated their activation scheme, or compelled the company to activate it without your knowledge, that would be a cause for concern.

A list of participating manufacturers is right there on the company's web site: http://www.absolute.com/partners/bios-compatibility

My company recently investigated the LoJack system after one of our laptops got stolen. It's impressive technology. The sales rep talked up how "fortunate" they were to get the cooperation of many BIOS implementations from the folks who make BIOSes. I don't think that's fortune at all -- it's a corporate deal. Whatever.

It's common but not all-pervasive. (yet?) I looked for my laptop on the list and didn't find it, though, so it's not exactly all-pervasive. It's intended for corporations and individuals who want it.

While the inclusion of this feature into many BIOSes is kinda creepy, I'm not terribly unsettled by it. It does, however, make me want to pursue the open BIOS initiatives.

More to the point, I'd like to see this app extended to other criminals who cause major damage to society and yet move unseen among us. Unethical individuals in the banking, real estate, and politics business. Just so I know who I'm potentially making deals with. Their debts to society far outstrip the psychological twitch of one person's regretable encounters.

The sex offender stigma is totally overused, though.

So, one rotten character is spoiling the bunch, then?