![]() It could also mean that if and when you end up in hospital with a health issue your doctor can easily access long-term data on your vital signs. “We may even be able to understand root causes and give people positive feedback loops around the kinds of lifestyle choices that work best for their individual health.” “We’ll be able to track changes over time, relative to an individual, rather than at a point in time relative to a population,” says Harry Briggs, Managing Partner at OMERS Ventures, which has made investments in health tech companies. The goal is a future where health is about monitoring, prevention and early intervention rather than fixing health problems. Some think that personalized, data-driven medicine is the future of healthcare – and that it’s going to be driven by next-gen fitness wearables that passively monitor a person’s heart rate and blood oxygen levels, for example. Fitness wearables: personalized healthcare? He expects to soon see more focused monitoring from medical-grade devices that collect data on all the vital signs a hospital would gather from a patient – but in the community. “The next generation of trackers will see a dialling-up on the technical side, so losing the always-on screens and the bright displays to really double-down on things like blood glucose, blood pressure, respiratory rate, pain management and medication dosage,” says Nicholas Kelly, co-founder of care group Axela, whose cAIR:ID app (opens in new tab) brings together medical records and data from fitness trackers to predict mini-strokes. Cue Apple Watch’s limiting 48-hour battery life. The trouble with fitness wearables and smartwatches is that, for now, they’re as much about fashion as health monitoring. ![]() “We believe that wearables can help bridge the gap between visits to the doctor, and facilitate conversations between patients and their doctor.” “As we all take a greater interest in our health the idea of illness detection will be even more in the spotlight,” says Dr Heneghan. Fitness wearables: illness detectionĭr Heneghan says Fitbit is making progress in the areas of sleep apnea (opens in new tab) and AFib (opens in new tab), two of the most common health conditions worldwide, while recently published findings from its COVID-19 study (opens in new tab) suggest its devices have the potential to identify signs of illness before you show symptoms. That’s the first step in fitness trackers detecting medical conditions and then helping manage those conditions. “We’ve advanced from simply counting steps to bringing health information once only available from a lab or clinical environment – like heart rate and sleep tracking – directly to consumers’ wrists,” says Dr Conor Heneghan, Lead Research Scientist at Fitbit. We’re talking about serious health tracking here that can detect medical conditions and sleep problems you don’t even know you have. GPS and heart rate monitoring might be today’s must-have features, but tomorrow’s include ECG measurements, which are found on the Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy Watch 3 and Fitbit Sense.
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