The healthcare industry has gradually integrated medical wearables, which have developed into fascinating technologies, with patients. Fitted with a system that can be worn on the body, such devices allow one to gather and observe information on a patient’s health in real time thereby preventing or controlling disease in a more efficient manner.
Key Types of Medical Wearables
- Fitness Trackers: Most associated with the likes of Fitbit and Garmin brands, fitness trackers aid in recording the amount of work done, heart-beats, sleep duration and others. They enable users to adjust to an active lifestyle whilst recording helpful metrics that can be beneficial to the health system.
- Smartwatches: In addition to recording fitness, smartwatches such as Apple Watch and Samsung Galaxy Watch have more features such as ECG electrocardiogram, blood oxygen levels and fall detection. These devices are used for monitoring health on a regular basis enabling one to detect health problems at the early onset.
- Wearable ECG Monitors: Hence, heart monitoring devices such as the AliveCor Kardia allow users to keep track of their hearts by performing ECG recording to screen for atrial fibrillation or other abnormalities of the heart rhythm. Such portable gadgets are essential for patients with heart problems.
- Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs): For diabetes patients, the CGM systems such as the Dexcom or FreeStyle Libre are simple and safe as they do not involve pricking the finger. Often these devices are useful as they lessen the amount of blood needed to test and they can warn of extreme levels of sugar in the blood, thus avoiding the risk of severe issues occurring.
- Wearable Blood Pressure Monitors: The use of devices like the Omron HeartGuide allows users to see how their blood pressure has changed over extended periods of time. Continuous outstanding blood pressure data can lead to improved hypertension management and a more comprehensive picture of a patient’s cardiovascular health.
- Smart Clothing: Smart clothing that has been fitted with sensors can also monitor other parameters like breathing rate, body temperature and other body functions. Hexoskin has advanced parameters monitoring devices for sports, chronic illness, and the aging population.
Benefits of Medical Wearables
- Personalized Healthcare: Insights from medical or health wearables are directed to the specific individual’s needs thus assisting the patient and the physician in coming up with individual treatment plans.
- Continuous Monitoring: The devices provide an opportunity for the real time recording of the vitals and therefore making it possible to discover any irregularities much earlier and respond to them more quickly.
- Patient Empowerment: The wearables are targeted in a way that people will be able to control their health since they will have access to some important health measures.
- Cost Efficiency: The convenience of wearables that help to monitor patients remotely may cut down on the hospital trips that patients are usually hospitalized for, and this will also ease the pressure on healthcare facilities.
- Data-Driven Insights: The data that is accumulated over time, can be analyzed to determine other healthcare aspects, qualities which can be useful in population health management and further research.
Challenges and Considerations
However, medical wearables do have several challenges as well:
- Data Privacy: Owing to many people using medical wearables, many insights and personal health records are generated and that poses the question, where do the masses store it and keep it safe?
- Accuracy: Since the data is wearable, it is nice that people can operate it without clinical checks, however, most of it will not be clinical accuracy level, and therefore could affect diagnosis or treatment.
- Accessibility: The cost related to the use of wearables poses a challenge to the poorer unicorns and this may cause unfairness in the distribution of healthcare services.
Future Prospects
In the circumstances where the rapid development of technology goes on, wearables will probably mesh into regular medical practice. Improvements in artificial intelligence, big data and 5g will be aimed at these devices so as to provide the society with better monitoring and predictive healthcare, as the precision of 5g allows for it.
Wearables are the 21st century medicine and treatment because they allow patients to manage their health on the go and make it easier for healthcare professionals and patients to connect. It possesses a lot of potential that can help improve outcomes, cut costs and change the way we look at preventive care in the near future. Healthcare is likely to be more integrated, customized and advanced than it is today.
Medical wearables and their possible use in several years will not be the same – there will be new high technologies and the patients will transform this industry by themselves. Most of the future aspects of medical wearables are as follows:
1. Integration with Artificial Intelligence (AI) Medical Wearables
The application of AI in the medical wearables will raise the bar for diagnosis and prognosis to the next level. AI can assist through advanced analytics of Big Data by spotting trends in the health of the patient that even they may not see and this will consequently help in prevention of chronic conditions like obesity, diabetes and even in some cases cancer. These AI algorithms can further offer customized health plans or recommendations and instigate changes in the health plan in accordance with continuous monitoring.
2. Personalized Medicine Medical Wearables
Wearables will remain a vital piece in the transition toward individualized medicine. Thanks to the all-time assessment of certain health markers of each person, wearables can track information that responds to every individual’s biological system. With this data, healthcare professionals will be able to devise a personalized treatment regimen, thus prescribing medications and remedies that are in consonance with one’s genetic make-up, personal habits and health condition with the current status of the individual.
3. Advanced Remote Patient Monitoring Medical Wearables
There are also plans to incorporate even more remote monitoring so that there will be less need for regular physical follow-ups by the patients’ Domestic Support for Medical Care Approaches Like Telehealth RPM will be widely accepted and used by patients in future. Rather, wearables will in the future be used by healthcare professionals to gather more data, which will assist in effectively monitoring chronic diseases, recovery from surgery, and older patients over distances. Due to the low latency of 5G technology, the healthcare workforce will be able to take swift drastic actions when there are considerable changes in health especially with the elderly people.
4. Integration with Telemedicine Medical Wearables
The increased acceptance of telemedicine will make medical wearables even more strategic. Patients will be able to upload health data via devices straight to the physicians facilitating remote diagnosis and treatment through the internet. It could do away with out sickness treatments such as higher readmission rates, optimize recovery, and most especially provide evidence and data on induced efficiency of health services.
5. Improved Accuracy and Expanded Capabilities
In the context of continual advancement of sensor technologies, the medical wearables will become more precise and able to track more health and fitness dimensions than before. In addition to checking the heart rate and levels of activity, tomorrow’s wearables could also assess the hydration and hormone levels, how well particular organs are working, etc. The increase in sensor technology will inject medical accuracy into consumer devices making them ready for healthcare purposes.
6. Non-Invasive Health Monitoring
Most wearables available today rely on skin contact to continuously measure health indicators, but there is always hope for future reductions or total elimination of invasiveness when monitoring health. For example, instead of having a glucometer, smart contact lenses which can measure glucose levels could be used while sensor infused patches or bandages could enable continuous monitoring of vital signs without wires or funkiness.
7. Wearables for Mental Health
The definite future of medical wearables will come with additional devices purposely aimed at the monitoring of mental wellness. Wearables could also be able to measure physical signs of stress/ anxiety/depression through the simple measurement of heart rate variability, sleep, and electrodermal activity (skin conductance). After that, the system would apply machine learning approaches to this information timeline to provide feedback or offer users the opportunity to consult a specialist.
8. Healthcare Data Ecosystems
In the upcoming years, the era of health-focused gadgets will dawn, wherein medical wearables will be an integral part of the bigger health medical data universe. Syncing with wearable devices to EHRs will facilitate constant communication between healthcare providers that can rely perpetually on new data streams. Such connectivity will make it possible for health management to take a new dimension as wearables can send alerts when readings are abnormal and call for corrective action before it is too late.
9. Innovative Designs and Form Factors
Artificial Intelligence — something which most technology companies will devote plenty of resources as time goes by — is expected to ameliorate the comfort/bulkiness/design of wearable devices. Instead of seeing thick bulky gadgets, wearables which are super light and flexible might be contained in common clothes, smart clothes or even embedded in our body, such as devices or microwires. This will lead to better adherence as tracking health will no longer be a task that people will have to remember but something that will occur spontaneously.
10. Chronic Disease Management
Chronic ailments such as diabetes, hypertension, and respiratory illnesses will have their management made easy with the help of wearables. For examples, continuous glucose monitors will advance into devices that prescribe insulin based on the patient’s dietary choices and blood sugar levels. These kinds of wearables are like portable, hand-held ‘mini doctors’ which will provide us with treatments or changes that can be made according to the information they record.
11. Blockchain for Data Security
Considering the rise in data privacy concerns, most likely, the incorporation of such technology will be soon embedded in the field of medical wearables. By decentralizing and encrypting the information, Blockchain can provide security and integrity to health data. It is possible that with this system, the patients will have more agency over their own health data and will be able to determine who is allowed to heat it and for what duration.
12. Preventive Healthcare
There is a transformation in the wearable devices where the corrective purposes will be its core as the advanced stage. This is how wearable devices will provide the possibility for medical specialists to anticipate bringing forth risk factors that if ignored can lead to a more severe problem. For instance, wearables would provide assistance in combating cardiovascular diseases by detecting the onset of such diseases thus treating the patients before severe conditions such as heart attacks develop.
Conclusion
The emergent medical wearables look to not only alter healthcare but also engage the patient, healthcare system and deliver quality care quicker. Such devices, owing to their enhancement due to the emergence of AI, Sensor technology and the area of data integration, will add to the relief of the patients by increasing positive outcomes and decreasing healthcare costs. Technology identified as wearables will, as they progress and develop, become key components of the ongoing shift towards a more data-centric healthcare industry.
About The Author
