Wearables Technologies for a Healthier Patient & Doctor Relationship
Introduction
Wearables and sensors have been considered a strong benefit for our lives for at least half a century now, and we still somehow seem to be at the cusp of innovation in healthcare. From consumer apps to industrial sensors, wearable devices have found a foothold in our society that has gone far past convenience and novelty. Their applications are vast as they monitor biometrics and health data at a granular and frequent rate with real-time feedback for clinical remote monitoring of diseases, rehabilitation, disabilities, and more. From a business perspective, healthcare institutions have a valid business case to leverage this technology to its fullest extent. Wearable sensors are capable of monitoring the same vital signs as analogous medical instruments, and they also have better hardware capacity, a smaller footprint, and a lower cost. Furthermore, wearable technology allows for monitoring and management outside of the hospital thereby significantly decreasing the cost of intensive treatment.
Today, we have a myriad of wearable technology ranging from smartwatches to rings that can track a myriad of health behaviors and indicators, such as physical activity, sedentary behavior, weight, diet, heart rate, blood pressure, and sleep. We’re likely to see this wearable landscape flourish in the coming years especially due to the lasting effects of COVID-19. The global smart wearable market was valued at $62.11 billion in 2021, and is expected to be worth $145.49 billion in 2027. This market is determined to grow at a CAGR of 13.85% over the forecasted period of 2022–2027. With this explosive rise in consumer/patient sensors, the healthcare industry also estimates a global cost savings of over $200 billion while also freeing up a significant portion of bed and staff time.
In this article, I’ll highlight some of the benefits and challenges of leveraging wearable devices in healthcare and showcase exciting trends of where the applications are going in the near future.
A Healthier Partnership
Wearable technology has enabled the [ideally] annual doctor’s check-up to happen nearly every day. Now we have a myriad of technologies to conduct remote monitoring for health indicators that blend social determinants of health and biometrics at a more frequent and granular level which is so incredibly crucial to get a complete picture of a patient’s health.
Leveraging analysis of this health data for sleeping, food habits, fitness, and more allows for a really beneficial relationship between a physician and a patient. Now, physicians can monitor far more patients at a closer level with an automated monitoring setup to signal which patients may need greater time and expertise to improve their health. This focusing of time on the right patients at the right time, while also increasing the volume of patient oversight, is a dramatic shift in the healthcare landscape.
Remote monitoring and greater insight on a more frequent basis is a massive benefit to the patient, but the real goal with these efforts is to effectively change health behavior positively. It has been studied and proven that small interventions, social influence, and gamification can have a strong influence on health behaviors. Wearable technology has the benefit of not only analyzing patient data at a closer level but also has the ability to pair with an application on a patient’s phone allowing for a social network and gamification to be built alongside physician monitoring.
Each physician understands that although medical diagnoses can be algorithmically understood, each patient needs personalized care that is well tailored to their own lifestyle, history, and ailments. This personalized care is done best through wearable technologies and software applications as it perfectly blends patient data and their goals/lifestyles to enact effective behavior changes.
Challenges and Limitations
Although the future potential of a healthier connection between a physician and his/her patients is clearly there, wearable technology is not without its issues. Nearly all the challenges boil down to these key points:
- Selection bias
- Measurement errors
- General “messy” data
Selection bias is an issue with nearly every software product, but there are methods to balance the datasets and ensure balance in the results of analyses. With that being said, it’s imperative to note that any software you may build is not evenly distributed to patients across genders, ages, geographic locations, socioeconomic statuses, and/or races/ethnicities. Hence the data collected from these tools and patterns extracted from that data can lead to inaccurate results. Algorithms and analytics that get in front of this issue by balancing their datasets and ensuring the fairness of results are crucial, especially when dealing with healthcare outcomes.
Measurement errors seem more prominent with consumer apps and wearable technologies. There are validated healthcare wearable technologies that are more official and leveraged in specific controlled settings. The validated technologies are also prone to error, but having a strong data validation in your pipeline and a data governance council is crucial to ensuring data is processed appropriately before moving downstream to analytics and algorithms.
General “messy” data can be due to a myriad of reasons (temperature, inconsistent recordings, etc.) and are hard to draw concrete conclusions from. Due to this, it makes sense to be wary of wearable technologies but there is a lot of work being done to mitigate this issue. Most research studies today conduct testing for robustness and correctness to help this issue to some degree, but digital products may or may not.
What the Wearable Future Looks Like
Digital wearable products that will win the future will be the ones that capture trust first and then data. Ultimately the goal of these products is to build a healthier partnership between a patient and their doctor with the overarching goal of better health for the patient. Applications that don’t reinforce trust in how data is captured, stored, analyzed, distributed and more will likely only capture interest at best.
Doctors have a right to be reserved when it comes to the proliferation of this technology, so it will be on the enterprises to meet them where they are at. Ensuring an augmented technology partnership with health systems is going to be a key step in building a strong bridge between patients and their doctors.
References
[1] Saifuzzaman, et. al., A Systematic Literature Review on Wearable Health Data Publishing under Differential Privacy
[2] Loncar-Turukalo, et. al., Literature on Wearable Technology for Connected Health: Scoping Review of Research Trends, Advances, and Barriers
[3] Huhn, et. al., The Impact of Wearable Technologies in Health Research: Scoping Review
[4] Mualem, et. al., Utilizing Data from Wearable Technologies in the Era of Telemedicine to Assess Patient Function and Outcomes in Neurosurgery: Systematic Review and Time-Trend Analysis of the Literature
