Imagine this: one day, your youngest child wakes up complaining of aches and pains. Thinking it’s a fever, you check her temperature, and find nothing to be concerned about – in fact, she’s running a 99.0 Fahrenheit, or 0.4 degrees higher than the average temperature of 98.6, or well within reason. Thinking she’s just worried about a math test, you send her off.
Turns out, your kid’s body temperature normally runs at 96.0 – a perfectly healthy, and common, trait that hid the fact that she was actually running 4 degrees over normal, and wasn’t faking at all. Now, she’s gotten everyone else at school sick too.
Don’t worry – even in this made-up anecdote, this isn’t a life-threatening illness. But it’s still an inconvenient situation that might be less common in the future thanks to research being done right now about Covid-19. Oddly enough, you could very soon be getting better medical care while going to the doctor less frequently – thanks to wearable technology.
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“My interest in this came from the exposure of stressors on the heart and the brain,” says Dr. Zahi Fayad MD, professor of Radiology and Medicine at Mount Sinai. “I’m trying to measure what’s happening to the immune system, so I wear an aura ring, I wear a smartwatch, I wear a strap when I’m exercising… I want to know my heart rate, my heart variability. I want to get a better understanding of my body as I get older.”
Dr. Fayad, along with Dr. Robert Hirten, are leaders of the Warrior Watch Study, a comprehensive study building mountains of data to understand how we can use smart watches and other wearables to take better care of patients and live healthier lives. And yes, we’re talking about the smartwatches you can buy right now and may already own.
The main advantage of wearable technology is that instead of taking your temperature once the way we do now, you’re taking it constantly. That creates a baseline temperature that’s specific to you, removing the problem in the example at the beginning of this article. But more importantly, it measures temperature variability, and opens up the door for monitoring variability of all kinds of other physical traits.
“So the thing we really focused on is heart rate variability,” Dr. Hirten told us. “That’s the calculation between the small variations between heartbeat. With that, you can detect very small changes long before people know they’re sick. This doesn’t just happen with Covid, it happens with much more mundane things like inflammatory bowel syndrome.”
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The more the device measures, the more diseases it can detect (You can already monitor your blood glucose with Apple products, and there are rumors that future Apple Watches may have a non-invasive monitor built-in). Most impressively, this kind of monitoring can detect illnesses far faster than current methods.
“For Covid, we were able to detect infection 7 days before a positive nasal swab,” says Dr. Hirten. “It’s a significant difference.”
It is currently believed that more than half of Covid-19 infections come from people who aren’t aware they’re infected, so a lead time of an entire week could result in a huge decrease in transmission. Technology like that could potentially stop future pandemics in their tracks.
One of the best perks from this? Fewer doctor visits, which saves you time in normal circumstances and lightens the load during health crises like the current one.
“These tests happen every day, and it takes you only 30 seconds,” Fayad told us. “E-consenting is probably how things are going to be going forward. It’s so much easier.”
Though the use of wearables and other digital health services has been consistently on the rise since 2015, The PEW research foundation has found that this stuff still disproportionately benefits the wealthy and educated. About 31% of Americans earning more than $75,000 per year wear a smartwatch, while that number is 12% for households earning under $30,000.
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“We know this,” Dr. Fayad says. “But this technology will become cheaper. It’s the same with cell phones: it was once just the guy on Wall Street. Now, cell phones are pervasive, even in poor countries.”
In 2014, 89% of South Africans owned a cell phone – matching the United States. Dr. Fayad thinks that COVID-19 will motivate the world to bring everyone together to prevent future pandemics because it’s made it undeniably cure that we all share one planet, and what affects one of us can affect all of us.
“Healthcare is very conservative, things take a long time to get there,” he says. “But we do think that Covid will give everyone a kick in the butt. More and more, we’ll be integrating technology into the daily management of patients.
The Link LonkFebruary 20, 2021 at 12:03AM
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