SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A number of doctors aren't so sure about the benefits of wearables eithers. A recent MIT Technology Review story found doctors from a number of specialities unsure about what to do with the data many of their fitness-tracking patients are bringing them."Clinicians can't do a lot with the number of steps you've taken in a day," Neil Sehgal, a senior research scientist at UCSF Center for Digital Health Innovation said. Andrew Trister, an oncologist and researcher at Sage Bionetworks echoed this sentiment. "[Patients] come in with these very large Excel spreadsheets, with all this information," he said. "I have no idea what to do with that."
One of the short-term problems for trackers is that their [sic] not actually reliable enough to be medically useful. The sorts of measurements that devices cheap enough to be commercial products tend only to focus on vague metrics that could just as easily be inferred from a short interview or basic examination. While certain health trackers have shown promise—such as the small implants that manage insulin for diabetics—they can also produce a hyper-vigilance and paranoia, leading to a degenerative process of over-managing issues that a person's body is already handling.
Are there Soylentils that do use fitness trackers regularly? Do they help you manage your health?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fadrian on Wednesday December 02 2015, @02:08PM
Do you really want your doctor wasting his time with your noisy, and, in the end, anecdotal data (usually not presented in a form that's clinically useful) as a primary source for his or her analysis of you? It's all going to end up as a single checkbox on a lifestyle form (denoting "Patient exercises regularly") in a chart, anyway. I'd rather they'd spend their time getting a decent verbal patient history and actually examining me any day than spending their time trying to upload data or read a clinically dubious report from a stupid consumer device.
That is all.