Wearable tech can monitor our health, but why are doctors so skeptical?

Wearable tech – currently dominated by smartwatches – is a multi-billion dollar industry with a particular focus on health tracking.

Many premium products claim to accurately track exercise routines, body temperature, heart rate, menstrual cycle and sleep patterns, among others.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting has spoken about a proposal. Give wearable For millions of NHS patients in England, it enables them to track symptoms such as their response to cancer treatment from home.

But many doctors – and tech experts – are wary of using health data from wearables.

I’m currently trying out a smart ring from the Ultrahuman firm – and it looks like I’m going to get sick before I do.

He warned me one weekend that my temperature was slightly elevated, and my sleep was restless. He warned me that this could be a sign that I was coming down with something.

I mentioned something about perimenopause symptoms and ignored him – but two days later I was in bed with the gastric flu.

I didn’t need medical attention, but if I had – would the data from my wearable help healthcare professionals treat me? Many wearable brands actively encourage this.

Ovra Smart Ring, for example, offers a service where patients can download their data in the form of a report to share with their doctor.

Dr Jack Deutsch, a US-based clinician who also advises Aura, says wearable data enables them to “predict overall health more accurately” – but not all doctors agree that this is the case. Really useful all the time.

Dr Helen Salisbury is a GP in a busy practice in Oxford. She says a lot of patients don’t come into their wearables to check in, but she’s seen an increase, and it worries her.

“I think that as often as it’s useful, probably more often than not, it’s not very useful, and I worry that we’re creating a society of hypochondriacs and over-monitoring of our bodies,” she says. “

Dr Salisbury says there could be a number of reasons why we might get temporary abnormal readings such as an increased heart rate, whether it’s a rupture in our body or a device malfunction – and Many of these do not require further investigation.

“I worry that we will encourage people to monitor everything all the time, and see their doctor whenever the machine thinks they are sick, rather than when they think they are. “

And she makes a further point about the psychological use of this data as a kind of insurance policy against traumatic health diagnoses. A nasty cancerous tumor, for example, wouldn’t necessarily be flagged by a watch or app, she says.

What wearables do is encourage good habits — but the best message you can take away from them is the same advice doctors have been giving us for years. Dr Salisbury adds: “You can actually walk more, don’t drink too much alcohol, try and maintain a healthy weight. That never changes.”

The Apple Watch is said to be the world’s best-selling smartwatch, although sales have declined recently.

Apple hasn’t commented, but the tech giant uses true stories of people whose lives have been saved by the device’s heart-tracking function in its marketing, and anecdotally I’ve seen quite a few. Heard. What I haven’t heard, however, is how many cases of false positives there are.

In many cases when patients present their data to healthcare professionals, clinicians prefer to try to recreate it using their own devices, rather than relying on wearables to What has caught

Dr Yang Wei, associate professor of wearable technologies at Nottingham Trent University, says there are several reasons for this, and they are all very practical.

“When you go to the hospital, and you measure your ECG. [electrocardiogram, a test that checks the activity of your heart]you don’t have to worry about power consumption because the machine is plugged into the wall,” he says.

“On your watch, you’re not constantly measuring your ECG because you drain your battery right away.”

In addition, movement — both of the wearable on the wrist, for example, and the general movement of the person wearing it — “can introduce noise” into the data it collects, he added. This makes it less reliable.

Dr. V pointed to the ring on my finger.

“The gold standard for measuring heart rate is from the wrist or directly from the heart,” he says. “If you measure with a finger, you’re sacrificing accuracy.”

It’s the role of software to fill such data gaps, he says — but there’s no international standard for wearables — either for the sensors or the software that powers the wearables. provide, or for the data itself, and even in what format it is collected. .

The more consistently a device is worn, the more accurate its data is likely to be. But here’s a cautionary tale.

Benwood was out for the day when his wife received a series of alarming notifications from her Apple Watch, telling her he had been in a car accident. He suggested texting her instead of calling her because she might need to keep the line clear for emergency services.

The warnings were real, and sent to him as his emergency contact – but unnecessary in this case. Ben was on a race track driving some fast cars. He admitted he was “not very skilled” at it – but said he felt safe all the time.

“The boundaries between an incident and an alert need to be carefully managed,” he wrote in a blog post. “I’m curious to see how device manufacturers, emergency services, first responders and individuals think about this technology in the future.”

Pritish Mistry, fellow for digital technologies at King’s Fund, agrees that there are significant challenges around layering existing patient-generated data into our healthcare systems, adding that for many years in the UK The debate continues without a clear solution.

He says there is “a good case to be made” for wearables in the UK government’s current campaign to push care into hospitals and community settings.

“But without the infrastructure to enable the technology, and to help the workforce acquire the skills, knowledge, capacity and confidence, I think it will be a challenge,” he adds.