What Can A Smartwatch Do For Your Health
Tech giants have commited themselves to making 2015 the year of wearable technology. During the first few months of this year, they’ve been introducing a wide array of wearable devices, such as smartwatches and smartbands. Most of these innovative devices have one thing in common: they try to seduce consumers by promising a healthier and more active life.
Users can now find out, with increasing precision, how many steps they take every day, the calories they burn, the miles they run or swim, the time they spend sleeping, or have a register of their pulse rate. But well beyond the use people can find for this data, there’s another possibility that hast just come forth: donating this data to science. And this could very well stir up medical research and clinical trials. In addition to personal motivations, users can Watch actively participate in studies to improve public health.
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Smartwatches help motivate users to sit less and get more exercise
The underlying technology was already there, thanks to Big Data and mobile phones. In fact wearables have yet to prove themselves to be more precise than smartphones when tracking physical activity. Or so reads a University of Pennsylvania research study, comparing 2014’s most popular phones (iPhone 5S and Galaxy S4) with fitness-oriented smartbands (like Nike FuelBand, Jawbone UP and Fitbit Flex). The study’s authors question the need to invest in a new gadget. They argue that latest-generation phones, already so widely distributed (more than 65% of adults in the US own a smartphone), are a much better solution for physical activity and basic health data monitoring.
Last year, companies such as WebMD launched new services to help translate all that biometric data into useful information for the end user. Thanks to an app, the data compiled by the phone itself or by a paired device (such as a smartband, wireless weight scale or glucose monitor) is sent to health professionals who are capable of analyzing that data and who then recommend measures for the patient to take. Health objectives and actions are established from within the app. This initiative could appeal to anyone with an interest in a healthier lifestyle or, more specifically, to patients who suffer from chronic illnesses like diabetes type II or obesity. These patients need closer health status monitoring and the study of their biometric data could allow physicians to foresee their crises.
WebMD’s Healthy Target program also cleared a new path: once a patient hands over her biometric data to a platform, which treats it anonymously and ensures confidentiality, this data acquires a new value that goes beyond individual use for the patient’s treatment. Data analysis on a massive scale, with millions of smartphone users connected to a medical program, could offer revealing new patterns that could improve our understanding of diabetes, obesity and other diseases.
