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"The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. You look at the world around you, and take it apart into its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens."
- Frederik Pohl

Death-Rattle  
  A device that sends a signal upon brain death of the user.  

This is an early reference to the idea of a tag or medallion that performs a continuous medical monitoring function, and then communicates that information wirelessly to another location.

Heimie and died, and his death - the cessation of his neural pattern - had triggered off an automatic squawk. A rattle didn’t particularly protect its owner, but its existence ensured (or usually ensured) detection of the murderer. Why had it failed Heimie?

…Tirol hadn’t known about Heimie’s death rattle; Heimie had been wise enough to do the installation privately.

Technovelgy from The Unreconstructed M, by Philip K. Dick.
Published by Science Fiction Stories in 1957
Additional resources -

Compare to the Death-Rattle file from Dick's 1965 novel The Zap Gun and to the Taprisiot monitor bead from Frank Herbert's 1977 novel The Dosadi Experiment.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Unreconstructed M
  More Ideas and Technology by Philip K. Dick
  Tech news articles related to The Unreconstructed M
  Tech news articles related to works by Philip K. Dick

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