Wearables in the medical field
Everyone agrees that prevention is better than the cure. This simple maxim is especially resonant in the medical field, where countless billions of dollars are spent on treating people who need to be admitted to hospital for care. Wouldn't it be better to identify health-related problems before they became serious enough to require a hospital visit? Championing this line of thinking is specific wearable technology.
Defined as any wirelessly-connected electronic accessory worn on the body or on clothing, wearable-technology devices use small, energy-efficient sensors, predominately based on the ARM® architecture, to process information and provide feedback to the user and/or healthcare provider.
Getting under your skin
The most obvious example of wearable technology for healthcare is a heart-rate monitor. Measuring a person's heart-rate over a prolonged period of time helps identify abnormalities that may lead to cardiac-related problems in older patients. This information is wirelessly transmitted, via the Internet, to healthcare professionals who monitor the activity and can intervene at the first signs of problems, rather than, as is the case now, wait for major arrest to take place.
Similarly, blood-glucose and blood-pressure monitors keep track of a patient's long-term status. In the case of diabetes, for example, wearables alert patients to reduce sugar intake if levels become too high. All of this information is tracked and recorded and be analysed, in real-time over WiFi, by the healthcare provider. Companies such as Nuvoton manufacture such monitors, while Texas Instruments and STMicroelectronics use the ARM Cortex-M® series architecture when designing the application processors contained within the monitors.
But there's more to wearable technology than merely attaching a device to the skin. Empowered by the latest architecture from ARM, tiny processors and sensors have enough performance to provide meaningful data for healthcare professionals. Take the Freescale KL02 chip as a case in point. Smaller than the dimple on a golf ball when packaged up a complete processor, including WiFi support, it can either be swallowed or embedded directly into the body. The chip is able to send data back to the healthcare provider, enabling them to diagnose and monitor a patient's well-being in real time.
More than just sensors for patients
Wearable technology is more than just patient-side monitoring. Last year, surgeons in America used a combination of augmented reality and Google Glass wearable technology to enable out-of-theatre surgeons to help in procedures whilst working remotely. This novel implementation of wearable technology, very much in its infancy, potentially opens the way for larger, more-experienced teams to help in difficult cases, and such an approach takes sensors, devices and WiFi connectivity to another level.
It is often said that information is power. The widespread use of wearable devices equipped with an array of sensors enables more health-centric information to be processed and collated than ever before. Sensor-derived information also provides patients with a real stakehold in their own health - knowing they need to reduce cholesterol or improve cardiac function, without requiring a hospital visit for non-mandatory tests, is key in motivating a better lifestyle.
Changing the status quo of taking action for health problems after they afflict us, wearable technology, as it pertains to the medical field, has the potential to improve incidences of prevention rather than, as it currently the case, focus on costly cures which overburden underfunded healthcare services around the world.
