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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: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 12 2018, @09:54AM
There's a difference between "stranded on an island" and this situation.
And there's also a difference between you and this snyder person.
You are living with a condition that has already been diagnosed by mental health professionals.
Because you are living with it, you have learned a lot about it already.
I will note that despite of this, you yourself have stated on this site that there are still times when you don't realize you are in a manic state (and you spend all your savings).
In any case: when we discuss chronic disorders, obviously the patient may learn about their condition, to the point where they are able to tweak day-to-day treatments without input from a doctor.
Michael Snyder is a geneticist, apparently with a love of smartwatches, and quite smart. He was able to correctly guess his condition mostly because he knew he'd been bitten by a tick, and the only newsworthy thing is that his sensors detected the symptoms before he could realize something was wrong by himself. But he then proceeded to ask for antibiotics before a proper test was performed, and he was given these antibiotics. This is wrong, because we already have antibiotic resistant bugs in hospitals killing people.
And of course if you're on an island with only a couple of friends, you do the best that you can. But you always pick the best candidate for the job.
Medicine is hard and you need to memorize a lot of facts because the system being worked on is so ridiculously complicated.
Individual humans will generally fail to make correct causal links when it comes to the human body, hence my annoyance.
People are dumb enough to give money to churches and palm-readers.
If a university professor starts saying "hey everyone, forget about going to the doctor on regular visits, just use this here smartwatch", then most people will be happy for the excuse.
Even if he follows up with "but when the smartwatch does notice something, do run it by your doctor", most people will not listen, because that's the way that people work.
And, as a university professor, he should know better.