Our health is in our hands SCIENCE 28 APRIL 14 by DANIEL KRAFT The life-loggers, our featured health techMatthew Shave/Bryan Christie This article was taken from the May 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wireds articles in print before theyre posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. The healthcare world that most of us experience -- and the one that clinicians are traditionally incentivised to operate in -- has been one of sick care, in which we focus our time and energies on treating diseases once they have appeared, or reached a point where they can no longer be ignored. The practice of medicine often resorts to a reactive state because the information which can be acquired from an individual, whether blood tests, vital signs, electrocardiograms or other measures, is incomplete at best, especially for the majority of us who spend most of our lives away from clinics and hospitals. Further compounding our reactive system is the fact that the ability to understand and make decisions from sporadic and fragmented health data (traditionally stored remotely in paper files) has primarily been left to interpretation by clinicians, doctors and consultants. This paradigm, however, is on the cusp of change. Were beginning to shift from an era of intermittent, reactive health and medicine to one that is based on information, feedback and analytics. This will become proactive and continuous while engaging and empowering the individual (whether a healthy consumer or a patient), clinician and healthcare system. We are faced with many challenges, such as ageing populations, morbidity from high obesity rates and neurodegenerative disease, compounded in many parts of the world by a shortage of primary care physicians. Many of the digital devices and tools featured on the following pages will give us the opportunity to address many of these challenges for the consumer, patient and practitioner, as well as whoever is footing the bill, particularly as the incentives better align to reward prevention and early detection. The convergence of faster, smarter, smaller, cheaper and interconnected technologies is accelerating exponentially. Devices are giving us new ways to measure, track, visualise, understand and optimise our bodies, health and wellbeing. The benefits could range from low-cost genetic sequencing to the layering of distributed mobile devices and sensors, wearables and implantables. The network of devices that makes up the internet of things could bring about the internet of the body. The quantified-self movement began with leveraging basic consumer- and fitness-focused tools such as the Fitbit digital pedometer, but it is expanding to make use of a growing array of devices that can track metrics ranging from sleep patterns to brain waves. We are still in the era of 1.0 wearable sensors, but there are early signs of 2.0-era advances -- such as the Basis Watch (a fitness tracker which measures your movement, heart rate, sleep and perspiration), the Quanttus wristband and low-cost wearable patches (such as those from Vital Connect) which can transmit your electrocardiogram data, vital signs, posture and stress levels anywhere on the planet. This new generation of seamless and integrated devices -- and thats including Apples long-rumoured iWatch -- will combine with mobile apps and secure APIs to connect your data to the cloud. Your healthcare system will be regularly prescribed for improving wellness, diagnosis and therapy. Devices such as the AliveCor Heart Monitor and low-cost handheld ultrasound technologies put measurements once consigned to an intensive-care unit into the hands of consumers and clinicians. The Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE has incentivised and spurred teams from around the world to develop consumer devices for home-based monitoring, connecting mobile diagnostics, artificial intelligence and beyond. One entrant, Scanadu Scout, a sensor designed by Yves Béhar, is due to come to market this year after crowdfunding was used to fund research and initial clinical trials. By using these technologies and feedback loops, a physician, nutritionist, personal trainer or your social network can help you to be more accountable for your wellbeing. Privacy is critical of course, but leveraging the so-called Hawthorne effect (did you hit your 10,000 steps today?) can be a powerful way to implement behaviour change and adherence to medical regimens. We will all become more empowered, responsible for our own health with useful insights into our everyday wellness, disease prevention and disease management. We also have new ways to interact with our healthcare providers through digital checkups and telemedicine. Our data will also benefit biomedical research and others with similar conditions. We now have the opportunity to make sense of the terabytes of data which each of us can generate every day. Artificial intelligence and our personal dashboards will lead to an era of predictive analytics. With so much being tracked by so many devices, we will need to filter and integrate our personal data to the point where we arent overwhelmed by it. Imagine a GPS system for your health: it knows your habits, your genomics and your goals, and can help you reach a target, whether that be to run a marathon, lose weight, manage hypertension or lower your risks for cancer. Many challenges remain, not least from the regulatory bodies and insurers, which struggle to understand and leverage these fast-paced technologies. But having the ability to access and share user-generated health data can disrupt our often inefficient and error-prone healthcare systems and bring us to a new era -- one which can help us to reach our full potential as individuals.
Posted on: Tue, 06 May 2014 22:12:30 +0000