Remember New York City(tm)s plan to reward students who excelled with cellphones? That plan fell by the wayside, not because so many people thought it was absurd •€” after all, cellphones are not allowed in New York City Schools ” but because the project•€(tm)s guru, the Harvard economist Roland Fryer, decided to apply his energies elsewhere not long after the project began.

The plan seems to have had at least some ripple effect: Starting in February, the Visiting Nurse Service of New York will begin a pilot program to try to combat Type 1 diabetes in young people by offering more personalized health care ” and to the young people, ages 11 to 17, who enroll, they are offering specially programmed BlackBerrys.

The Blackberrys are, to some extent, a hard, cold incentive: participate in this diabetes care management program, and get a hot gadget. But the BlackBerrys will have been programmed specifically to help young people monitor their health, so that instead of writing in some notebook what they•€(tm)re eating and how they feel, the young people can do it on their phones, looking like they(tm)re blithely texting a friend instead of trying to avoid the emergency room. The phones function like personal coaches, automatically turning on if a child turns it off after receiving one of the preprogrammed prompts, say, to check blood sugar.