Google is the Web's king of data collection, aggregating details from users' search queries, e-mail, even phones and photos. Now, thanks to a partnership with IBM, it's about to start pulling that personal information directly from users' bodies.

On Thursday, Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) and IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) will unveil 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. In demonstrations, IBM and Google fitted Wi-Fi radios to gadgets like heart rate monitors, blood pressure cuffs, scales and blood-sugar measurement meters, allowing the devices to communicate with a PC and feed real-time medical information directly into Google's online records.For IBM, the new Google Health functions are also a dress rehearsal for "smart" health care nationwide. The computing giant has been coaxing the health care industry for years to create a digitized and centrally stored database of patients' records. That idea may finally be coming to fruition, as President Obama's infrastructure stimulus package works its way through Congress, with $20 billion of the $819 billion fiscal injection aimed at building a new digitized health record system. More At; http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/04/google-ibm-healthcare-technology-internet_0205_google.html