Health Wearables: What Your Data Can – and Can’t – Tell You

Where is it that you find wearables the most helpful when someone has a condition that they're seeing you for? So whether it's heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, sleep disorders, where do we see the biggest value in these tools?

I have to say the biggest value of my practice has been in rhythm detection with ECG that in the past we would have relatively rare events.

We would do seven, 15, 30 day telemetry and still not be able to pick it up.

And now we actually have the ability to get a rhythm strip in real time from anywhere on the planet.

And I think that's been very useful and has helped my practice dramatically.

I think it's, it's really one of the signature outputs of wearable tools.

The other area I think that's been quite powerful for my standpoint is just documenting how much exercise people actually do.

It's showing step counts in a quantitative way that allows you and your patient to actually agree on what the metrics are.

And you can give people concrete metrics because often what ends up happening is people are not measuring either the total distance traveled or the time they take to travel it.

And wearables allow you to do that in a way that lets you actually compare people with themselves over time.

And I find that particularly powerful.

I think sleep is starting to be an area where that is also helpful.

People are beginning to use it in that way.

But the reality is that this is a rapidly evolving field.

I think you're going to see more and more metrics over time.

You've started to see some of the wearable makers begin to predict menstrual cycle.

There's a whole slew of things that I think are tractable in this space if you have the right contextual information.