Oura
Smart rings have built-in sensors that monitor the wearer's heart rate and other health issues
Wearable technology – currently dominated by smartwatches – is a multi-billion dollar industry with a focus on health tracking.
Many high-end products claim to accurately track exercise routines, body temperature, heart rate, menstrual cycle, and sleep patterns, among other things.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has raised a proposal to provide wearable devices to millions of NHS patients in England, allowing them to track symptoms such as reactions to cancer treatments from home.
But many doctors – and technology experts – remain cautious about using health data captured by wearable devices.
I'm currently trying a smart ring from the company Ultrahuman – and it seemed to know I was sick before I did.
This alerted me one weekend that my temperature was slightly elevated and my sleep had been restless. This warned me that this might be a sign that I had something to worry about.
I talked about the symptoms of perimenopause and ignored it – but two days later I was bedridden with a stomach flu.
I didn't need medical assistance, but if I did, would the data from my cell phone have helped medical professionals with my treatment? Many wearable brands actively encourage it.
The Oura smart ring, for example, offers a service that allows patients to download their data in the form of a report to share with their doctor.
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Apple Watch dominates the wearable technology sector
Dr Jake Deutsch, a US-based clinician who also advises Oura, says wearable data allows it to “assess overall health more accurately” – but not all doctors agree that this data is actually useful at all times.
Dr Helen Salisbury is a GP in a busy practice in Oxford. She says few patients come in brandishing their handheld devices, but she's noticed it's increased and it concerns her.
“I think depending on how many times it's helpful, there are probably more times it's not terribly helpful, and I worry that we're building a society of hypochondria and over-monitoring of our body,” she said.
Dr. Salisbury says there can be a large number of reasons why we may temporarily get abnormal data, such as an increase in heart rate, whether it's a problem in our body or something else. 'a device malfunction – and many of these do not require further investigation.
“I worry that we're encouraging people to constantly monitor everything and see their doctor every time the machine thinks they're sick, rather than when they think they're sick.”
And she adds another point about the psychological use of this data as a kind of insurance policy against shock health diagnoses. A nasty cancerous tumor, for example, won't necessarily be flagged by a watch or app, she says.
Wearables encourage good habits, but the best message you can get from them is the same advice doctors have been giving us for years. Dr Salisbury adds: “What you can really do is walk more, don't drink too much alcohol and try to maintain a healthy weight. It never changes.
The Apple Watch is reportedly the world's best-selling smartwatch, although sales have slowed recently.
Apple has not commented, but the tech giant uses real stories of people whose lives were saved by the device's heart tracking feature in its marketing, and anecdotally, I have also heard a lot. What I haven't heard though is the number of false positive cases.
In many cases, when patients present their data to healthcare professionals, clinicians prefer to try to recreate it using their own equipment, rather than simply trusting what the wearable has captured.
There are several reasons for this, says Dr Yang Wei, associate professor in wearable technology at Nottingham Trent University – and they're all very practical.
“When you go to the hospital and measure your ECG (electrocardiogram, a test that checks your heart's activity), you don't worry about power consumption because the device is plugged into the wall,” says- he.
“On your watch, you’re not going to measure your ECG continuously because you’re immediately draining your battery.”
Additionally, movement – both from the wearable itself on the wrist, for example, and from the general movement of the person wearing it – can “create noise” in the data it collects, adds -it, which makes them less reliable.
Helene Salisbury
Dr Helen Salisbury questions whether wearable technology is creating more hypochondriacs
Dr. Wei shows the ring on my finger.
“The gold standard for measuring heart rate is from the wrist or directly from the heart,” he says. “If you measure by finger, you sacrifice accuracy.”
It's the role of software to fill these data gaps, he says – but there is no international standard for wearables here – nor for the sensors and software that power wearables, nor for the data itself, and even for the format in which it is collected. .
The more regularly a device is worn, the more accurate its data is likely to be. But here's a caveat.
Ben Wood was away that day when his wife received a series of alarming notifications from her Apple Watch, telling her that he had been in a car accident. He advised her to text him rather than call him, as he may need to keep the line clear for emergency services.
The alerts were genuine and sent to him as an emergency contact – but in this case useless. Ben was on a race track driving fast cars. He admitted he “wasn’t very good” at it – but said he felt safe at all times.
“The boundaries between incident and alert must be carefully managed,” he wrote in a blog post. “I'm curious to see how device manufacturers, emergency responders, first responders and individuals view this technology in the future.”
Pritesh Mistry, digital technology researcher at the Kings Fund, acknowledges that integrating current patient-generated data into our healthcare systems presents significant challenges, and adds that the discussion has already been going on for several years in the UK without any resolution clear.
He says there is “good reason to make the case” for the use of wearable devices as part of the UK government's current efforts to move care out of hospitals and into community settings.
“But without that underlying foundation of technological enablement in terms of infrastructure and without supporting the workforce to gain the skills, the knowledge, the capabilities and the confidence, I think it's going to be a challenge,” he adds.
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