Why are doctors so skeptical about wearable technology that can monitor our health?
Smart watches now dominate the multibillion-dollar wearable technology sector, with a major emphasis on health tracking.
Among other things, a lot of high-end gadgets promise to precisely monitor sleep patterns, menstrual cycles, body temperature, heart rate, and exercise regimens.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has discussed a plan to provide wearables to millions of NHS patients in England so they may monitor symptoms from home, including responses to cancer treatments.
However, many medical professionals and tech specialists remain cautious about using the health data that wearables collect.
I’m testing out a smart ring from Ultrahuman right now, and it seemed to sense my illness before I did.
One weekend, I received a warning that I had a slightly elevated temperature and was experiencing difficulty sleeping. They cautioned me that this could signal an impending illness.
I disregarded it after reading about perimenopausal symptoms, but two days later I was bedridden with the stomach flu.
Although I didn’t require medical assistance, would the information from my wearable have aided medical personnel in treating me if I had? This is something that many wearable companies actively promote.
For instance, the Oura smart ring has a feature that allows users to download their data as a report to share with their physician.
Although not all medical professionals concur that wearable data is always truly helpful, Dr. Jake Deutsch, a US-based clinician who also counsels Oura, claims it helps him “assess overall health more precisely.”
A busy general practitioner in Oxford is Dr. Helen Salisbury. Although she says she doesn’t see many people showing off their wearables, she has noted a rise in this behavior, which worries her.
“I worry that we are creating a society of hypochondria and over-monitoring of our bodies, and I think that for the number of times it’s useful, there are probably more times that it’s not terribly useful,” she adds.
According to Dr. Salisbury, there are numerous reasons why we could momentarily experience abnormal data, such as an elevated heart rate, including a medical blip or a malfunctioning gadget. Many of these reasons don’t necessitate additional research.
“I worry that we’ll be pushing people to constantly check everything and visit their doctor whenever the machine indicates they’re sick, instead of when they feel sick themselves.”
She goes on to discuss the psychological use of this information as a sort of safeguard against unexpected medical diagnoses. For instance, she says that a watch or app won’t always detect a horrible, malignant tumor.
Wearable technology promotes healthy habits, but the most important lesson is the same one that doctors have been teaching us for years. “The thing you can actually do is walk more, don’t drink too much, and try to maintain a healthy weight,” Dr. Salisbury continues. That remains constant.
Although sales have recently slowed, the Apple Watch is still reportedly the best-selling smart watch worldwide.
Although Apple declined to comment, the tech giant’s marketing features anecdotal accounts of people whose lives were saved as a result of the device’s heart-tracking capability, and I have personally heard many of them. The number of false positives, however, is something I haven’t heard.
Instead of relying solely on the data that the wearable has recorded, physicians frequently try to reproduce the data using their own tools when patients submit it to them.
According to Dr. Yang Wei, an associate professor of wearable technologies at Nottingham Trent University, there are a number of extremely useful explanations for this.
He explains, “You don’t have to worry about power consumption when you go to the hospital and measure your ECG [electrocardiogram, a test that checks the activity of your heart].
“You won’t be using your watch to continuously measure your ECG because it will quickly drain your battery.”
Furthermore, he says, movement—both the wearable itself on the wrist, for instance, and the wearer’s overall movement—can “create noise” in the data it gathers, decreasing its dependability.
Dr. Wei gestures toward my finger’s ring.
He asserts that obtaining a heart rate reading directly from the heart or from the wrist is the optimal method. “Measuring with your finger compromises accuracy.”
He suggests using software to fill these data gaps, but there is no international standard for wearables — either for the data, its format, or the sensors and software that power it.
The more often you wear a device, the more accurate its data is likely to be. Here’s a warning story, though.
Ben Wood’s wife received a series of alarming alerts from his Apple Watch while he was away for the day, informing her that he had been involved in a car accident. Because he might need to keep the line open for the emergency services, it suggested that she text him instead of calling.
Although superfluous in this instance, the notifications were real and were sent to her as his emergency contact. Ben was driving several swift automobiles at a racetrack. Although he acknowledged that he “wasn’t very gifted” at it, he claimed to always feel secure.
“It is important to carefully manage the boundaries between incident and alert,” he wrote in a blog post. “I’m interested to see how manufacturers, first responders, emergency services, and individuals view this technology in the future.”
The integration of current patient-generated data into our healthcare systems presents substantial hurdles, according to Pritesh Mistry, a digital technologies fellow at the Kings Fund. He also notes that the debate has been ongoing in the UK for a number of years without a definitive conclusion.
He believes that the UK government’s ongoing initiative to shift healthcare from hospitals to community settings presents a compelling case for wearable technology.
He continues, “But I think it’s going to be a challenge without that underpinning foundation of technology enablement in terms of the infrastructure and supporting the workforce to have the skills, knowledge, capacity, and confidence.”
