Wearable devices are a type of technology that is on the rise and that little by little is contributing its bit in terms things to take into consideration regarding wearable healthcare technologiesof controlling the physiological state of people. These wearables have the same appearance as clothing or accessories (hence their name), and allow monitoring the activity of the organism and easily collect data.
These devices have enormous potential to become essential objects in the future for the collection of useful data to assess the state of health of the patient. At the beginning they appeared as some kind of new and cool heart rate monitors for athletes, and now they are capable of monitoring heart rate, steps, calories lost, distance covered, travel speed, body temperature, and even sleep rhythms. All these data can be easily consulted through applications for smartphones or in personal accounts on devices´ web pages.
Understanding this situation, it is not unreasonable to think that in a few years they will be able to measure more parameters with enormous efficiency, and what was thought only for athletes and some curious techies, will end up becoming a tool to keep track of sick patients, and for doctors to have instant access to these data through the Internet.
Surely medical programs will also emerge with algorithms that trigger an alarm when they receive certain data, being able to speed up treatment or prevent health problems by receiving parameters that as a whole indicate that something is not going as it should.
However, they not only have applications for health. They could turn us into true cyborgs, facilitating tasks in all kinds of circumstances. Undoubtedly, it is a technology that, in my opinion, along with 3D printers, will change our society in the same way that other devices such as telephones, television, computers, the Internet and, more recently, smartphones did in the past.
It is better for us to get familiar with all these advances little by little, because new inventions will emerge faster and faster, and both the new generations and the not-so-new ones will have to live with them.
Wearables devices can give us a lot of data about our bodies, but also on the Internet. In general, you can access almost any type of information on the Internet. The ease with which anyone can publish something on the net means that there is a multitude of information posted that anyone can access from anywhere in the world. Considering this, we can see that, apart from its great advantages, wearable devices can be dangerous as well.
Many people choose to research about health issues through forums and opinion sites on health-related topics. Some even self-diagnose and self-medicate based on what they read online, and this causes a high risk to the patient’s health, since they could:
- Confuse an illness with another.
- Think he has a serious health problem when in reality he doesn´t have.
- Self-medicate wrongly.
- Make medical consultations online replacing the personal visit to the doctor, which is not always advisable.
- Create an obsession for consulting information, generating hypochondria disorders.
These are just some of the problems that misuse of Internet information can cause. This suggests that the advancement of technology in society does not only imply knowing how to use these advances, but also requires education for the proper use of these advances, since technology can be very good if used properly, but otherwise it can become counterproductive.
Regarding wearables, it could be appropriate for users to know some parameters such as heart rate or calories burned when doing a certain exercise. But other more specific parameters should be used by more professional athletes who really know how to use those parameters.
This is not usually a problem as most amateur devices have few parameters. However, this is not a problem nowadays because, as it happens with smartphones, over the years premium features end up being included in more basic devices, so in the end they would be commonplace.
As for medical wearables, they should be able to record data, but make it available only for doctors. Why does a patient want to know the data from her analyzes in detail if she doesn’t know how to assess them? Personally, I don’t think that this would bring anything beneficial to the patient, unless the patient suffered from a chronic disease and the doctor had expressly detailed what she should do in certain situations.
