hat time is it? If you just looked down at your smartwatch, then you’re one of the millions of Americans who have contributed to the booming wearable technology industry. The demand for wearable tech is rapidly increasing as consumers become more invested in living a healthier lifestyle and keeping track of their progress with data. This rise in the popularity of wearables is particularly of interest to the healthcare industry, which can leverage the valuable data pool that’s quickly accumulating.
The Rise of Wearable Devices in Healthcare
Wearable tech in healthcare refers to any wireless device that consumers wear to collect real-time information about their personal health, such as exercise, pulse, blood pressure, etc. This growing industry is evolving to bring consumers a broad range of products, including fitness trackers, smart health watches, ECG monitors, blood pressure monitors, glucose trackers, and asthma monitors (to name a few). While each new advancement in product design is exciting, from our perspective at Tyrannosaurus Tech, the most intriguing part of wearable technology is what we can do with the collected data.
These devices have the potential to provide game-changing benefits to the healthcare landscape. Beyond encouraging users to become more invested in their health by incentivizing healthy habits, wearable tech delivers valuable data to medical professionals and empowers the patient-doctor conversation. This data can provide life-saving information such as real-time remote monitoring of symptoms, signs, and trends. Varying data points will equip healthcare professionals with an extensive information bank for future medical developments and research.
How the Healthcare Industry Can Use Wearable Tech Data
Outside of designing the latest and greatest wearable device, the tech community is excited to find new and innovative ways to leverage the collected data. Without software that can streamline, analyze and distill the data in a meaningful way, these devices are just another flashy accessory. In healthcare, this large data set can provide insights into specific populations if processed and stored efficiently. Healthcare professionals have the potential to make discoveries in disease research, cut costs, reduce in-person visits, and create more customized treatment plans.
We anticipate a rise in the ways this data can be leveraged, visualized, and made actionable, opening up exciting opportunities for meaningful and personalized user experiences. For example, we partnered with the team from Fountain Life to create a digital product that calculates a user’s biological age based on health habits and activity. By integrating with wearable tech, collecting, and analyzing the data of its members, Fountain Life can make custom recommendations to users to help them improve their biological age. This digital product is just one example of the unique opportunities that wearable tech data can furnish.
On the other side of the spectrum, companies such as Phillips, Vivalnk, and Dexcom are developing high-accuracy biosensors suitable for high-risk ambulatory situations where monitoring vitals outside of the hospital is crucial. The patient’s data is then monitored against thresholds and can deliver a notification to the doctor when triggered. This technology has the potential to help doctors take action remotely and prevent a potentially life-threatening scenario. The sky is the limit as far as the benefits of leveraging advanced wearable technology.
Seamless Data Analytics from Wearable Technologies
As we see it, the opportunities are endless when it comes to leveraging wearable technology data because our team already has extensive experience with many of the tools needed to build an exciting digital solution in the space. For example, we have built integrations with Apple HealthKit and Google Fit that allow us to pull data from various devices, normalize it, and translate it to an intuitive app experience. We’re also well versed in various tools and strategies for visualizing this data in a compelling way. This preparedness enables us to quickly get our clients up and running to collect data from their users, so we can focus our efforts more specifically on meaningful insights that they want to present to the user. We have the technology, we have the experience, and we have the components to get all the functionality off the ground quickly, so let’s get started!