The Rise of Wearables: Integrating Wearable Data into Healthcare Apps for Improved Patient Care

Impactful and dominant are the two words that can correctly describe the use of wearable devices. Impactful because almost 34% of the American population is actively using wearable devices on a regular basis. And dominant because ever since its introduction it has quickly captured a huge market share creating a unique space for itself.

To give you an example, there are as many as 77.7 million smartwatch users in America, and the number keeps on increasing with each passing day. One of the key findings from Statista suggests that almost 560 million units of wearable devices are shipped to the US this year.

This high rate of adoption of wearable technology is because of the unique use cases that it has offered to the users. Allowing users to keep track of their health to help them save significant amounts of money on tests, wearable technology has become an integral part of the healthcare industry.

Today, with digital healthcare practices coming to the mainstream of healthcare delivery, wearable devices have shown the potential that they can completely change the way healthcare works. Making up a significant portion of digital healthcare delivery, wearable technology in healthcare has somewhere become successful in changing the nature of healthcare delivery from reactive to proactive.

With the rise of wearable technology in healthcare and continuous vital sign monitoring, healthcare providers are now able to provide better preventive care with a more holistic and personalized approach.

But how wearables can improve patient care so efficiently?

Wearable data integration enables biometrics tracking, early health detection, and better chronic disease management. And in this blog post below, we’ll find out how wearable technology in healthcare does that and the numerous benefits of integration wearable data into healthcare apps.

Tracking Vital Signs and Biometrics

Remember the time when a physician used to check your pulse and tell you what condition you’re suffering from? Well, long gone are those days, but it has been a standard practice back in the days. However, drawing inspiration from that approach, advancements in wearable technology in healthcare now allows biometrics tracking, early health detection, and monitoring other crucial elements of health.

For instance, the wearable devices are connected with healthcare apps, this way these wearable devices continuously monitor and transmit the readings from devices to the smartphone. For instance, these devices track heart rate, blood pressure, sleep patterns and other health activities which are recorded and stored on the application.

When these records are shared with healthcare providers, it gives them valuable insights onto a patient’s overall health and lifestyle. This way providers can easily predict any potential health threats and proactively act on them for forming personalized healthcare plans with wearable data and better chronic disease management.

Let’s try to understand this with an example; let’s say a patient with chronic heart disease uses wearable devices to monitor their health. The device will track the patient’s heart activity, along with sleep patterns and other vitals, and transmit them to the provider. The provider will then conduct wearable data analytics and draw out some plans to improve patient outcomes. This will include personalized medication and timely interventions to stop the deteriorating health of the patient’s health condition.

Early Detection of Health Issues

The unique preposition of wearable devices in healthcare is that it records almost every minor health activity of the patients. For instance, it can detect abnormal heart rhythms, potential sleep apnea and other signs that indicate that the patient is having declining health.

Here the provider can timely intervene in the care plan and suggest effective medication and make changes in the care plan that could help in improving patient outcomes. This is one of the major benefits of integrating wearable data into healthcare apps. Its continuous vital signs monitoring, coupled with wearable data analytics, can enhance chronic disease management and the development of personalized healthcare plans with wearable data.

As seen in the example earlier, wearable data integration in healthcare apps would enable early health detection and could possibly avoid life threatening situations for the patient. This is how wearable technology in healthcare can enhance care practices with proactive and preventive measures. Isn’t it a good way to always keep our health in check for a long and healthy life?

Personalized Medicine and Preventive Care

Another use case of wearable technology in healthcare is developing personalized healthcare plans with wearable data. Since the wearable devices will be monitoring and collecting vital signs data continuously it will help the provider in accessing crucial information about how the patient’s body reacts to the decided disease, condition and treatment.

If, after a certain period, the condition of the patient does not seem to improve, then the provider can make effective changes in the treatment plan, making it more personalized for the patient. It will not only help the patients to know how their body reacts to disease but also in knowing what plans work for them and what needs to be done for better care.

Along with that, the insights the healthcare apps will provide with wearable data integration will also provide a sneak peek into the patient’s lifestyle. By continuous vital signs monitoring the patient can easily know which healthy habits and lifestyle changes he needs to make for a healthy life.

Challenges and Considerations

Wearable technology in healthcare has some of the most beneficial prepositions in the entire digital healthcare industry. However, in the space of digital healthcare landscape, wearable data security is one of the major concerns since it is highly prone to cyber threats. The main challenges of wearable data integration in healthcare are maintaining wearable data security, standardization, and interoperability. Wearable data security is crucially important since it is one of the fundamental rights of the patient. This has been achieved with the implementation of robust encryption of healthcare apps and the enabling of role-based access.

Apart from that, for healthcare apps to correctly interpret the data received from wearable devices, it is important to implement data standards like HL7, FHIR, etc. This is important to achieve interoperability and to enable healthcare apps and wearable devices to communicate and interpret the data shared correctly.

Some of the potential limitations of wearable devices failing to achieve that with wearable technology in healthcare are accuracy and user compliance. And the only way to achieve this is to implement robust data standards and achieve interoperability.

The Future of Wearable Data Integration

Wearable technology in healthcare has enabled a smooth transition from reactive healthcare practices to proactive healthcare practices. Furthermore, the future of wearable technology for health management can be so effective that it can change the entire landscape of healthcare practices and healthcare delivery. Wearable data analytics can not only enhance healthcare for both patients and providers by making access to care easy and affordable.

Along with that, the introduction of AI-powered healthcare apps can further personalize the experience. These AI-powered healthcare apps can help healthcare providers speed up the wearable data analytics process, and the suggestions can lead to better care delivery and significantly improve patient health outcomes.

However, something that needs to be checked here is the ethical use of wearable technology in healthcare. Since it deals with patients’ data, it can be used in many ways. Though there are necessary compliances that healthcare practices using wearable devices should comply with, but on the ground level the healthcare providers have to take the initiative and allow only ethical use of AI and wearable data analytics to provide better care.