Wearable Tech: Health Tracker

Category: Wearable

Industry: Health

Location: Global

Related to: New Technologies/Wearable/Health

Reviewer: Julie Haller – Parsons The New School of Design

Company: Global

Website: https://singularityhub.com/2017/02/07/wearable-devices-can-actually-tell-when-youre-about-to-get-sick/

Fitness trackers are more and more becoming health trackers because people are more using these trackers to get a healthy life rather than a fitted life. Indeed, they are constantly monitoring heart rate, skin temperature, oxygen saturation, blood pressure… And these variables are useful to detect if the wearer is going to be sick.

With all the data collected from the different captors, it can help doctors for their diagnosis and detect more easily if you are going to get flu for example, but also more serious diseases as Lyme or diabetes.

“I think [wearables] will be the wave of the future for collecting a lot of health-related information. It’s a very inexpensive way to get very dense data about your health that you can’t get in other ways,” says Michael Snyder, a professor and chair of genetics at Stanford University and senior author of the study, “Digital Health: Tracking Physiomes and Activity Using Wearable Biosensors Reveals Useful Health-Related Information.”

This collection of data is also a good opportunity for big companies, as Google and Apple for instance, to enter the market of health and improve the technologies.

All this technology can be very helpful but it also highlight a major problem, which is totally increasing: health data privacy risks.

#health #tracker #wearable #technology