In a conventional setting, a healthy person with reasonable health care access visits their physician every 2 years for a routine visit. These physiological parameters such as heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature can provide critical information about the physical health status of this person. Unfortunately, the infrequent collection of these measurements as currently practised is problematic since a condition may arise many months, or even longer, before clinical symptom onset and thus go undetected for some time. These parameters also vary within the same person during their daily activities and with changes in the ambient environment. However, these sparse clinical measurements of an individual are often compared to the average measurements of a population. The large variation within and among individuals results in a problematic medical assessment.
To modernize the traditional approach to medical healthcare, wearables biosensors pave the way for the future. Biosensors are low-cost technologies that continuously or frequently measure physiological parameters and provide a promising approach to routinely monitoring personalized physiological measurements and potentially identifying alterations in health conditions. In addition to physiological measurements, wearable technology can precisely capture the wearer’s daily physical activities, which provides direct information on the physiological measures related to physical activities. Besides, patients no longer have to visit the doctors‘ offices for detailed heart rate or blood pressure readings as consumer tech giants churn out increasingly sophisticated smartwatches and high-tech rings that can measure vital signs and sleep patterns continuously. Though the market for people to track their vitals is growing, getting buy-in from doctors and hospital systems could vastly increase their customer base. [1]
Despite the revolution of wearable technology, studies investigating their use in health care have been limited. The Stanford Healthcare Innovation Lab, under the leadership of Michael Snyder, Ph.D., has been working with Apple on a large-scale study assessing whether the smartwatches can detect irregular heartbeats.[2] It’s also exploring whether other consumer devices like Oura Rings[3] and Fitbits[4] can give doctors better insight into patients‘ health by taking more accurate and frequent measurements. For instance, researchers have developed a system using heart rate and temperature data to predict the onset of COVID-19 symptoms, which could eventually alert patients to stay home.[5]
It’s not clear yet how the devices stack up to clinical-grade heart rate monitors, which doctors typically use to take snapshots of patients‘ heart activity while they’re in the office in detecting irregular heartbeats, Snyder said. But passively taking readings from smartwatches, which patients would already be wearing at home, could help doctors establish a better baseline for heart activity.
There’s also the challenge of ensuring that patients who can’t afford the devices aren’t excluded from cutting-edge medical programs. Therefore, lower-cost options like the Fitbit, for example, are examined compared to the higher-end devices at Stanford Innovations lab.
[1] Abid Haleem, Mohd Javaid, Ravi Pratap Singh, Rajiv Suman, Shanay Rab, Biosensors applications in medical field: A brief review, Sensors International, Volume 2, 2021, 100100, ISSN 2666-3511, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sintl.2021.100100.
[2] Dunn J, Kidzinski L, Runge R, Witt D, Hicks JL, Schüssler-Fiorenza Rose SM, Li X, Bahmani A, Delp SL, Hastie T, Snyder MP. Wearable sensors enable personalized predictions of clinical laboratory measurements. Nat Med. 2021 Jun;27(6):1105-1112. doi: 10.1038/s41591-021-01339-0. Epub 2021 May 24. PMID: 34031607; PMCID: PMC8293303.
[4] https://www.fitbit.com/global/de/home
[5] Alavi A, Bogu GK, Wang M, Rangan ES, Brooks AW, Wang Q, Higgs E, Celli A, Mishra T, Metwally AA, Cha K, Knowles P, Alavi AA, Bhasin R, Panchamukhi S, Celis D, Aditya T, Honkala A, Rolnik B, Hunting E, Dagan-Rosenfeld O, Chauhan A, Li JW, Li X, Bahmani A, Snyder MP. Real-time Alerting System for COVID-19 Using Wearable Data. medRxiv [Preprint]. 2021 Jun 21:2021.06.13.21258795. doi: 10.1101/2021.06.13.21258795. Update in: Nat Med. 2021 Nov 29;: PMID: 34189532; PMCID: PMC8240687.