The Power of Wearable Health Tech
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DpGBUJQaQWtv-lyP3iSRyXCH7SeM4166JiCICPmjnno/edit?usp=sharing
In 1960, the first wearable computer was designed by two MIT professors - Edward Thorp and Claude Shannon. It was small enough to fit in a shoe, but unlike the most basic wearable tech today, it wasn’t designed to count your steps or track your run. In fact, it was designed to predict where the ball would land in a game of roulette. Who could have ever thought that the first of wearable tech was designed not to improve health, but gambling outcomes!
Today, wearable tech is found widely and cheaply, becoming synonymous to health and fitness tracking. It is amazing to think about the number of variables that wearable devices can track today. In 2009, when Fitbit - a pioneer in this category - released their first fitness tracking device, you could track your steps, distance travelled, sleep and estimated calories burned. Flash forward to today, wearables can track athletic performance, offer insights into several aspects of wellness like menstrual cycle trends, sleep habits, heart rhythm and stress levels.
Consider this - less than a decade and a half ago, to track a run, you would have to get into a car, reset the odometer, drive to measure and then possibly use a stopwatch to record time. Now all you have to do is strap on a device on your wrist and go! Today wearing a health device is so common that more than 30% of the people in the United States use wearable tracking tools on a daily basis.
Several other wearables for tracking sports performance are already in the works. Some of these include soft fabric based sensors incorporated into clothing, small wearable patches for injury rehab, non-invasive wearable devices to monitor blood sugar, wearables that detect impact, and even workload and hydration status to reduce the risk of injury and improve athletic performance.
At Curia Health we strongly believe in the power of wearable health tech and its potential in scaling health system capacity using technology and remote monitoring. As personalised health recommendations become the next frontier of wearables and we slowly move away from population level recommendations like ‘get 10,000 steps everyday’ to more targeted advice based on personal health insights, the discussion of wellness and health is moving from diet and exercise to whole body health - a philosophy that has long been at the core of our own longevity and personalised medical practice.
Dr Jack Kreindler and his team at INSPIRE 22 recently undertook the largest medical expedition to be completed in the history of the South Pole, putting to test the potential of wearable technologies like never before. The team of INSPIRE 22 were able to track metabolic measurements in Antarctica immediately prior to, and after completion of the expedition to investigate the effects of acclimatisation and de-acclimatisation for the first time using specially designed wearable tech. In addition, indirect measurements of metabolism, including sweat and cortisol were obtained throughout the expedition from newly designed body-worn sensors. Antarctica is not only challenging for explorers, it is also challenging for electronic measurement systems – exposed to the environment at the South Pole, a normal mobile phone would be likely to stop working forever! Therefore, the wearable instrumentation used in Antarctica for INSPIRE 22 was specially designed to meet the challenges of the environment.
The expedition was a testament to the fact that consumer wearables are becoming capable of collecting health data like never before, and access to wearable data has the potential to change the healthcare landscape drastically. Not only can wearables provide powerful, moment to moment health analysis that could allow people to detect health issues at an early stage and improve outcomes, but also it could allow doctors to monitor their patients remotely.
If the INSPIRE team could track health biomarkers in the remotest part of the world, there is no question that wearables could break serious barriers in access to healthcare in remote parts of the world and pave the way for practising efficient telemedicine. Even in not-so-remote- cities, this could have major downstream benefits for public health as being able to monitor patients remotely may lead to reduced visits to the doctors office. This of course is contingent on the fact that wearables can be brought to the market at more affordable rates and their metrics are accurate, reliable and consistent. This will no doubt take time as wearable programs will need to be integrated into existing healthcare delivery, have tech support available, and be easily reimbursable through insurance and other means. Moreover, concerns regarding data protection, usage and regulation will also need to be tackled at a population level. Regardless of the challenges, in the years to come, wearable health tech will become increasingly woven into the fabric of our everyday lives - in ways innumerable and unimaginable to our current selves!