Modern healthcare has taken great strides over the past few years using wearable technology to provide inventive, patient-centric improved patient care, and health outcomes and enable individuals by allowing them to take charge of their wellbeing. Wearable technology is changing how healthcare works and feels, from telling you to move (if only five steps an hour) with fitness trackers measuring daily activity levels, to providing real-time health data by advanced smart implants.
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Wearable Technology in Healthcare — A Complete Guide
Wearable technology is the electronic devices that can be worn on the body as accessories or implants, such gadgets help to track information related to health. These devices range from personal fitness tracking wearables to complex medical implants, each designed for one or the other specific applications in healthcare. Wearables point to wearable adoption Wearable adoption in healthcare is fresh, it was only driven by migrating sensor technology to an older family of devices and miniaturizing them while no one asked for a personalized solution like the mobile health ecosystem does.
In the process, fitness trackers (Fitbit, Apple Watch Garmin, etc.) have become household names helping millions record their daily steps and heartbeat activity. Together, these devices give users real-time insights into their daily patterns allowing them to make more informed decisions regarding health and lifestyle. This has made fitness trackers a popular weapon in the arsenal to get people moving, lose weight, and improve health.
During the Fitness Era: Wearables for Chronic Disease Maintenance
Fitness trackers might be all the rage, but wearable technology has more important applications in managing chronic conditions. Continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) for diabetes, wearable electrocardiograms (ECGs) to monitor heart health, or smart inhalers to manage asthma are just a few such applications.
Diabetes patients can track their blood glucose levels throughout the day, in real-time with devices like CGMs to help prevent dangerous spikes or drops on monotonous time scales. This is similar in that wearable ECGs can help people diagnose their heart problems, track irregularities and share information with medical professionals to act early.
In addition to improving patient care, these wearables encourage individuals to be more proactive about their health decisions. Wearable technology also delivers real-time data and insights to patients so they can be proactive in managing their health, following a treatment plan as prescribed without missing crucial steps or appointments thereby preventing adverse events.
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Smart implants are an emerging category of wearables that stand to advance healthcare as wearable technology continues to progress. While wearable devices are a popular approach to on-the-user health monitoring, they work externally; but smart implants operate inside the body itself and can continuously monitor specific health parameters, provide directed therapies by using an “implant/harvester” hybrid mechanism like harvesting bioenergy from human organs coupled with wireless communication outside.
Smart implants in the field of neurology represent one potential use case. So, for instance, DBS (deep brain stimulation) implants help to alleviate symptoms in diseases like Parkinson’s through electric impulses into regions of your body. These implants are also programmable, and they can be adjusted remotely to adjust care based on the patient’s response.
Smart implants for drug delivery are another development or process that has the potential to be used to a higher extent. Theoretically, they could be programmed to release drugs for the body based on changes in blood chemistry or biological hurdles such as a low-grade fever. In this way, accurate dosing can be achieved, and the risk of side effects gets lower while at the same time making treatment more effective.
Smart Implants are also considered advanced in Orthopedic care which can monitor the healing progress of bones and joints, detect infections like Prosthetic Joint Infections (PJI), etc. by providing real-time data to healthcare providers interacting with them continuously. This patient is likely to have been implanted sometime in the next one or two years — and these same implants can someday totally change how we approach personalized medicine (with tailored treatments) and management of chronic diseases.
Challenges and Considerations
Although wearable tech presents several opportunities, it also has several downsides and things to consider. The main concern is data privacy and security. Wearables and smart implants are collecting reams of intimate health information that needs to be safeguarded from unauthorized snooping or breaches. This information must be kept confidential and secure, ensuring trust from the patient regarding their data along with adhering to regulations.
One of the challenges wearable technologies face now is more around integration into current healthcare systems. If wearables want to be effective, they will need EHR and other healthcare platform integration. This integration needs to be seamless and requires the collaboration of device manufacturers, healthcare providers, and IT specialists to capture data accurately store it and in turn generate actionable insight for clinical decision-making.
Finally, the price tag is a formidable obstacle to universal acceptance of wearable technology, and it seems difficult in more peak devices (e.g. smart implants) for wide use. Although prices are likely to fall as technology matures and economies of scale come into play, affordability remains a critical factor in delivering wearables within patient reach — irrespective of societal factors.
Conclusion
Wearable technology can help bridge this care gap in the healthcare landscape via novel solutions that provide better patient experience and improved health outcomes, enabling patients to take greater control of their health. Fit watches that encourage healthy habits to smart implants providing tailored treatment, wearable technology is shaping the future of healthcare. Nevertheless, along with every technological innovation comes some lessons and food for thought around wearables — one that we should all understand to make sure it is used safely, effectively, and in a fair way within healthcare.
Wearable tech will continue to grow in health care and produce new ways for us to manage our patients better. In the same way that a simple tractor created an agricultural revolution, increasing efficiency at every stage of farming: wearable technology is creating a healthcare revolution by becoming increasingly personal, easily accessible, and data driven.