Snyder and his team have pioneered an app that pairs with a smartwatch to detect infection and disease. Research shows that smartwatches with EKG can diagnose atrial fibrillation (AFib) with surprising accuracy (and some major brands already have received FDA approval for AFib features), and they may one day prove useful for flagging heart attacks as well.
“I would argue it’s just as crazy to go around without a health monitor.” “You don’t drive a car around without a dashboard,” he says. Hence Snyder flagging his Lyme disease before he felt a thing. Continuous monitoring provides a baseline – and your baseline is unique to you – revealing problems and alerting you to adverse events. It also empowers you, the average human, providing you with insight into your body in real time. As machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and data analytics evolve to harness the power of all this data, wearables are the ideal vehicles for collecting it. “Big data” is positively gargantuan in health and medicine. (Just ask any person still wearing Google Glass, if you can find one.) And global market intelligence firm IDC reported a dip in the wearables market in the first quarter of 2022.ĭespite the challenges, researchers remain dedicated to making sure that no matter what devices hold the key to our future health care, we'll wear them well. While there’s plenty of excitement around wearables, we all know a new technology’s hype does not always predict market size. Even if the science comes through, many hurdles will remain on the path to clinical and commercial use. Developing this technology is, to use the technical term, really hard. “When wearables can be very thin and skin-like, they’ll be more useful and impactful,” Misra says. Imagine a normal-looking shirt with invisible sensors knit into the fabric, or a device so small it can hide under your fingernail – or even inside you (this is not your grandmother’s pacemaker). Still others are pushing further, striving to make wearables friendly to our day-to-day lives, making them smaller, more flexible, stretchable, and even washable.įuture wearables could be “invisible,” blending into your clothes or adapting to your body, says Veena Misra, PhD, director of the ASSIST Center, funded by the National Science Foundation, which brings together researchers at North Carolina State University and partner institutions to build next-gen health wearables.
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And a skin patch on the back of your arm can measure your glucose levels 24 hours a day, no finger pricks needed – you can see in real time how your diet impacts your blood sugar, giving you a personalized road map for how to eat. A snug shirt can measure your vital signs continuously in real time. Smartwatches measure heart rate and sleep patterns – emerging apps can use this data to spot a COVID-19 infection before you do. In fact, this brave new wearable-world spans stages of development, and you can buy some of the gadgets right now. Science fiction has been promising us cool new stuff on our skin for decades – but what will our wearables actually look like and what will they be able to do? The future’s gaining pace thanks to advances in materials, sensors, and power sources aimed at next-gen wearables that accomplish two main objectives: Be less intrusive and more reliable.
Today’s ‘Stone Age’ Tech Hints at Tomorrow’s Medical Miracles We live in an era where a watch counts your calorie burn, pants fix your downward dog yoga pose, and glasses display notifications right before your eyes.īut tomorrow’s wearables won’t just augment your workout or your cellphone – they will alert you to oncoming illness, manage chronic conditions, and help doctors tailor treatments to each patient’s unique needs.Īnd the best part is they’ll do all this outside the clinic – so you can spend that time working, socializing, or living your life. We have a taste of this future today, of course. That’s just a glimpse of what wearables will soon be capable of for all of us.
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