Wearable Technology – Helping Your Doctor Help You
You might have heard the aggressive term “glasshole,” which unaffectionately refers to people who wear their Google Glass wearable computing device everywhere and all day long. The Google Glass is actually just one type of wearable computing device.
Smartwatches, smart wristbands, fitness trackers, helmet-worn impact checkers, back pain posture checkers, necklaces, clip-ons, smart clothing and other wearable technology already exist and may be an important part in the future of healthcare.
These gadgets can record various vitals and electronically send them to your doctor on your next visit, or via apps on your smartphone. When data collection becomes that easy, anonymize aggregated data from cities, states or even countries can be analyzed as a whole, to detect trends in the general populace.
Wearable Health Tech: By the Numbers
Smart wearables include glasses such as Google Glass. However, we’re looking at wearable tech that can monitor various body metrics. E.g., select smart watches, health and fitness trackers that may include smartbands, clip-ons, pendants on necklaces, bandage-like temporary wearable tech and even smart clothing and other items.
Google CEO Larry Page spoke at a TED conference in Vancouver in Mar 2014, saying that open medical records (that is, shared) will result 100K lives saved yearly. Data would be anonymized first, but if research doctors had access to the data, lives would be saved.
Juniper Research estimated the 2013 wearable market at at about $1.4B, and $19B for 2018.
By other accounts, the market is worth $3-5B in early 2014 and will rise to $30-50B by 2017 or sooner — a lot more than Juniper’s estimate.
The number of smartwatches and related devices on the market will increase from about 15M in 2014 to 373M by 2020.
170M health and fitness wearables are expected to be in the global market by 2017.
Fitness wearables collect data and typically sync with a smartphone at the user’s choice, though some can sync automatically. Smart wearables also typically have GPS and can use location and distance over time to calculate various metrics including, but not limited to, the following:
Number of steps
Approximate calories burned (given the user’s weight)
Devices with select sensors can (collectively) determine:
Sleep time and quality of sleep
The downsides to some current devices include the inability to be accurate pedometers (i.e., accurately measure footsteps), as they sometimes track hand motion that may not be in sync with walking.
The Fitbit Recall
The Fitbit Force has been a relatively popular bit of wearable tech that was recalled.
The Fitbit Force wearable is officially off the market as of mid-Mar 2014, due to complaints of skin irritation and blistering.
$50M in venture capital was raised by Fitbit.
1M units solid in the U.S.; 28K in Canada, after going on sale in Oct 2013.
9.9K complaints of skin irritation and 250 of “blistering” were reported to the CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission).
Fitbit actually reported a higher figure of 1.7%% of users experiencing problems, possibly due to nickel in part of the device that touches skin. (Nickel is a common allergen found in watch backplates and some jewelry.)
One theory for the skin irritations reported is that since the company encourages wearing the Fitbit through the day, users are finding that sweat, soap and moisturizers are being trapped under the smartband, causing “contact dermatitis.”
Another theory is mass psychogenic illness, whereby people hear about other people getting sick due to something and also get sick because they think they’ve been exposed to the same germs or toxins.
What Apple Is Up To
Apple is not yet in the wearables market, at the time of writing, though online rumors are flying that some time in 2014, they will reveal a durable curved glass “iWatch” smartband with some in-built sensors. The glass, called Willow Glass and made by Corning, is thin and flexible — the product of over 10 years of development.
The iWatch sensors are further rumored to be able to 