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from the and-watches-know-you're-getting-old dept.
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Smartwatches know you're getting a cold days before you feel ill
Once we had palm-reading, now we have smartwatches. Wearable tech can now detect when you’re about to fall ill, simply by tracking your vital signs.
Michael Snyder at Stanford University in California experienced this first-hand last year. For over a year he had been wearing seven sensors to test their reliability, when suddenly they began to show abnormal readings. Even though he felt fine, the sensors showed that his heart was beating faster than normal, his skin temperature had risen, and the level of oxygen in his blood had dropped.
“That’s what first alerted me that something wasn’t quite right,” says Snyder. He wondered whether he might have caught Lyme disease from a tick during a recent trip to rural Massachusetts.
A mild fever soon followed, and Snyder asked a doctor for the antibiotic doxycycline, which can be used to treat Lyme disease. His symptoms cleared within a day. Subsequent tests confirmed his self-diagnosis.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday November 12 2018, @12:54PM
I got a moto x360 or whatever its called a couple years ago when it was new, with the inaccurate idea I'd develop apps for it. Anyway the battery only ran about 12 hours at absolute best (like 30 minutes now, and irreplaceable of course) and the only sensor it had was heart rate so I'm impressed with all this blood oxygenation and skin temp stuff.
When biorhythms were a computationally "interesting" topic around the birth of the PC in the late 70s I looked kinda askance at it even though I was pretty young and I suspect this how smart watch data analysis is going to turn out in the long run. Its the same type of people falling prey to the same desires and PR, just slightly different tech a couple decades apart. Studying fads like this over time would be interesting. I guess phrenology was a thing a century ago, thats all I know for sure.