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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @02:34PM
The more likely outcome will be that each and every vendor will try to rope Doctors into having to pay large sums for analytical software that only analyzes data from it's brand of fitness tracker that they will be locked into using via DRM and won't be able to circumvent thanks to the DMCA provisions.
Then the open source community will find a solution that will work some of the time, but won't be adopted by the medical community because there won't be any turn key solutions and not many want to become Guinea pigs for the open source community in that profession, too much "risk"
(Score: 2) by snick on Wednesday December 02 2015, @03:13PM
Nope. The doctors will get the analytical software for free, and be incented to get _all_ their patients to buy the gizmo that goes with the doctor's software.
Open source won't even be considered because open source doesn't have sales reps.