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Despite the multi-billion dollar industry of wearable tech, many doctors and tech experts remain cautious about using health data captured by such devices. Wearable tech, currently dominated by smart watches, claims to accurately track exercise routines, body temperature, heart rate, menstrual cycle and sleep patterns. Health Secretary Wes Streeting has talked about giving wearables to millions of NHS patients in England to allow symptom tracking from the patient’s home.
Smart rings, such as those from the company Oura, have built-in sensors that monitor the wearer’s heart rate and other health issues. Wearable data allows doctors to assess overall health. Despite this, not all doctors agree that it is always useful, and some argue that it encourages hypochondria and over-monitoring of our bodies. False positives are an issue, as clinicians prefer to try to recreate the data using their own equipment rather than solely trusting what the wearable has captured.
There are several reasons for this. The wearable may sacrifice accuracy if it is not measuring the heart rate from the wrist or direct from the heart. The movement of the wearable on a wrist, for example, and the general movement of the person wearing it, can “create noise” in the data it collects, making it less reliable. It is the role of software to fill in such data gaps, but there is no international standard for either the sensors and software powering wearable devices or for the data gathered in different formats.
Pritesh Mistry of Kings Fund agrees that there are significant challenges around folding current patient-generated data into healthcare systems. The discussion around it has been ongoing for several years in the UK without any clear resolution. While some argue there’s a good case to be made for the use of wearables in the UK government’s drive to push care out of hospitals and into community settings, there needs to be an underpinning foundation of technology enablement in terms of infrastructure and support for the workforce to have the skills, knowledge, capacity and confidence
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