Healthcare Technology Featured Article

May 02, 2014

Wearable Tech Devices Poised To Bring Big Changes To Healthcare


While healthcare these days is still very much a hot-button issue as the Affordable Care Act shows some fairly major issues emerging, the advance of technology threatens to render much of our current discussion moot by making obsolete many standard precepts of healthcare itself. One of the biggest vectors for change in the field of healthcare is coming from certain items of wearable technology, which are offering a whole new way to look at patient care both in the doctor's office and beyond.

While wearable technology in general is gaining a lot of ground, thanks to a host of new smartwatches and some less conventional hardware releases besides like the Google Glass head-mounted display or smart headphones, the applications for wearable tech are doing likewise. Wearable tech makes particular sense as a healthcare tool, as it is the kind of thing that can be extremely close to a user at virtually any time. That's a point that's not lost on several developers, and also those in the healthcare field.

The idea is mainly one of potential, at least for now; no products really exist in this market owing primarily to the need to get approval from federal regulators before advancing healthcare concepts into the market. Apple reportedly met with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) back in December to broach the idea of mobile medical offerings on devices, and part of the rumor cloud around Apple's entry into the wearable tech market involves the inclusion of health information technology (IT) functions. Reports suggest that Google has something similar in the works as it too met with the FDA, and a Google contact lens is said to be in development, measuring glucose levels in tears to give diabetics a hand managing that disease.

The University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine cardiologist Dr. Leslie Saxon—who also serves as founder and executive director of the USC Center for Body Computing—offered a note of explanation about the idea of wearable tech in healthcare. Saxon said “What's going to accelerate health as much as anything is consumer devices having [medical] features on them so that we're continuously collecting this data over a large population of patients.”

We've already seen that wearable devices can have some value in healthcare, particularly in the preventative measures side of things. After all, a host of activity trackers are on hand, and activity is easily one of the biggest parts of prevention when it comes to several healthcare-related issues. The form factor of wearable devices is a huge help here—the device is always on hand, often on a wrist or in an ear or even, as with the contact lens concept, on the surface of an eye—and as the technology side of wearable tech improves, so too do the number of functions. Consider a world in which the elderly don't go to nursing homes any more for long-term care, but remain in beloved homes, able to summon help at an instant with a device on the wrist. We have video on this and several other topics available at this link.

Wearable tech has the potential to change a lot of the world as we know it. When incorporated into other fields, from machine to machine (M2M) communications to healthcare, the potential explodes beyond many people's capacity for belief. Only time will tell just what form these developments take in the end, but there's certainly plenty of possibility.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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