An excellent ZDNet blog post today from Russell Shaw looks at how WiMAX fulfills those sci-fi fantasies from the '50s -- just as Star Trek Communicators seem to have presaged modern smartphones.

WiMAX, Shaw suggests, could enable always-on medical devices to monitor a patient's vital signs at all times and automatically alert the right people if anything goes wrong.

Shaw's post links to a recent Reuters article which quotes MIT professor John Guttag as saying, "If your elderly parent is having trouble breathing, you can't rely on them to do something [like send a text message or make a call]. It would have to happen automatically."

It's a great idea -- and, aside from the challenge of eliminating false positives, it doesn't sound like it would be all that hard to implement.