Today in companies not staying in their lanes:

Hey, remember that scene in Aliens when the space marines encounter the xenomorphs for the first time and start getting slaughtered? And Sigourney Weaver and that useless captain guy were back on that transport watching the life signs on a monitor flat-line one by one? Well soon you may have that very same technology in your own home!

Not only can it save lives, but it also increases dramatic tension.

"Hey, you were in there a long
time. Everything come out ok?"

-Our hilarious future

There's a company testing a new device, similar to an Alexa, that can monitor people's health. It'll have sensors by which it can monitor heart rate and body temperature and send that data back to doctors. It could also detect a fall and summon an ambulance or spot other trouble signs like if a person hasn't gotten out of bed in a long time or is maybe making frequent trips to the bathroom, and-yes, frequent trips to the bathroom. Let's be adult about this. Frequents bathroom visits could be a sign of something wrong, and-oh grown up...

While this'll probably be geared towards elderly and at-risk people at first, it may someday be broadcasting everyone's status and bathroom trips to a call center somewhere. And while that sounds like a terrifying invasion of privacy, I'm kind of on board with it. Like most single people, choking to death alone in my apartment on rotisserie chicken or something is a very real possibility. So maybe this isn't such a terrible idea after all.

Pictured: A very real possibility.

More disliked than companies that
are literally killing people. That's
how much people hate Comcast.

Or is it? Because when you imagine who's on the other end of a home health monitor system like this, you picture doctors, right? Like a team of physicians gathered around computer displays of your personal telemetry, scrutinizing wavy lines and numbers and ready to send in a team of medics at the slightest sign of rotissery-related asphyxiation. You wouldn't say, picture the cable company, right? I ask because that's who's testing this new technology. Comcast, constantly one of the most hated companies in America.

Is it Orwellian though? I mean, Big Brother
wasn't billing you, so in a way this is worse.

You're probably most familiar with then as the company you pay for cable. Not because you need or even watch cable, but because it's part of some nonsense package they insist you buy in order to have internet. Yup, they're the ones we might all one day be entrusting our health and bathroom itineraries to. Which...I mean, at what point do we agree that the commercialization of healthcare has made the transition from absurdity to straight up Orwellian dystopia?

I don't want to be an alarmist but-wait, screw it. I do want to be an alarmist. I mean, what's to stop Comcast from offering different tiers of monitoring based on how much you shell out? Will they let someone die because they didn't opt for the premium cable/internet/life-saving medical assistance package? Or could they flat out cut your grandma's service for failure to pay? Also, Comcast is sort of famous for terrible customer service, so are these really the people we want monitoring our health?

"Ok Mr. Weiss, I see on my monitor that you've suffered a massive drop in
blood pressure and-what's that? Bleeding profusely? I see. I can have someone 
there between the hours of noon and four next Tuesday. Will you be home then?"

-The person between you and medical assistance