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Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1337
Are fitness trackers the future of healthcare?
Imagine your fitness tracker vibrates on your wrist – but it’s not because you’ve reached your 10,000 steps goal for the day or because you’ve received an email. Instead, your tracker is warning you that your blood pressure is high, your doctor has seen the stats in real-time and they want you to de-stress. Or maybe an analysis of your sweat is showing you’re a little too dehydrated. Or maybe the air around you is full of allergens and could set off your asthma.
The sensors within our fitness trackers have improved greatly in recent years. We now have more accurate heart rate monitors, accelerometers to detect the smallest changes in movement and positioning, and even ECG sensors in devices like the Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 and Amazfit Verge 2 to flag up issues with our hearts.
But many experts believe this is just the beginning and soon our fitness trackers will be packed with an even wider range of sensors to collect data that could, potentially, save our lives, diagnose illnesses and keep our doctors constantly updated.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 03 2019, @06:28AM (2 children)
Today doctors work like slaves in a galley - in ER they work 24 hour shifts, in clinics they work 8-10 hours like on a conveyor (nurses bring the patients in, the doctor jumps from one exam room to the next every five minutes.) They have no leisure time to receive single readings, especially not knowing what is the cause. Each doctor has hundreds of active patients and thousands of inactive ones - just look at the shelves in any medical office.
Usually the patient is tasked with buying a wrist device and measuring BP periodically - doctors invented parallel processing much earlier than computer scientists :-) If necessary, the patient will contact the doctor and get a recommendation. Patients with serious problems are using a certified medical service that provides the sensors, the Internet-connected hub and, sometimes, the 24/7 team that goes through the events, generate medically significant statistic and calls the patient, his caregivers, the doctor or even 911 depending on what they see.
A watch, however good, is not a medical device and cannot generate reliable data. Take heartbeat for example. Watches detect changes in absorption of light within the skin. This method depends on how close to the skin the watch is worn - and you cannot tighten the strap too much because the skin will not like it , and you develop skin rash, if not worse. A loose watch will provide noisy results or no results. A professional device will use glued pads that receive the pulse electrically [nih.gov], and if necessary they can have multiple channels (the watch has only one.)
A watch is still useful, of course. I have an Active2 now and use it for daily monitoring. I do not need to report these numbers to anyone because they are to quantify training, not treatment. But I'm not sure if an easy to use device, like a watch, can be dependable enough to give it to a heart patient who can die if the readings are not exact. And yes, there are legal issues here as well, and the FDA certification. Medical device companies [mddionline.com] design for FDA requirements; Apple or Fitbit or Samsung may design for looks and ease of use. The ECG pad in Active2 is not only not certified yet, the company isn't even willing to enable it as a second pulse source.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 03 2019, @09:04AM
Doctors aren't going to look at the readings. Big AI will.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 05 2019, @01:17AM
> doctors work like slaves in a galley - in ER they work 24 hour shifts
And why is this true? Something about the AMA limiting medical school class sizes? As people learn more about our health (information on the internet is part of this--for better or worse), the mystery and exclusivity of the medical profession is quickly waning.