Now I’ve been watching a ridiculous amount of TED Talks for the past 3 days for my final year project and I stumbled upon a phenomenal cross disciplinary idea. Formula 1 Technology saving babies.

How you may ask? Well, if we have a quick look at Formula 1 cars you’ll quickly understand why their technology could save babies from what seemed like unpredictable heart attacks.

Formula 1 cars have thousands of bits and pieces which, consequently, means about 25,000 things can go wrong with them. So the team rely on approximately 120 sensors in the car, 500 different parameters of logged data and 13,000 health parameters and events which enable the team to find out when things aren’t quite working the way they should. All this data is sent by telemetry to the garage giving the team 2 to 4 MB of data per second! Impressive? Yes, but check this out. This allows the team to create a story around the vehicle and analyse the data. I think you can probably tell where this is going…

… Lets move this technology out of the pitstop and place it in intensive care units for babies. Hooking this system up to the medical implements monitoring a baby would feed the same information into a data system that that Formula 1 car would’ve been sending in. So those 2 to 4 MB of information per second. This means that the unpredictable event can be somewhat predictable. Small changes in data 5 minutes before cardiac arrest can be used to save patients. What this technology does is create a ‘normal’ for the ‘unusual’ patient (by this I mean their norm will not be the same norm as a healthy child) and thus makes it easier to see when things are about to go wrong. As we know, Formula engineers can be somewhat ambitious so why not take it to the next level? They have implemented this technology into ambulances as well to start streaming data to the hospital about their next patient, via 3G, before they are even put in intensive care.

Some people say the Formula 1 industry can be full of overly ambitious and arrogant people, but when you see someone stepping out of their comfort zone with only their knowledge hand, I  can safely say that all the prejudice is gone and instead a deep respect takes its place.