The recent partnership between Google Inc. and International Business Machines Corp will revolutionize the healthcare system by feeding personal information directly from users' bodies to their PCs.

Google and IBM unveiled a new initiative that will allow Google Health, a site where users can store and track information about their medical history, to connect to and stream data from medical devices. IBM says that connecting these devices to the Web will offer a new immediacy and granularity of health monitoring.

IBM and Google showed that Wi-Fi radios fitted to gadgets like heart rate monitors, blood pressure cuffs, scales and blood-sugar measurement meters will allow the devices to communicate with a PC and feed real-time medical information directly into Google's online records. Patients will be able to exchange their personal health data with doctors or other authorized parties in real time.

Dan Pelino, manager of IBM's health care division said: "If there's something abnormal, you can catch it before you have an episodic intervention, like going to the emergency room. This is like OnStar for a patient, keeping constant information about you and sending alerts even before you have a problem."