Breaking Barriers: How Wearable Tech Paves the Way for a Healthier Future
The future of medical technology is moving at lightning speed, and it’s no shock that most of us will soon be sporting wearable tech. While some may hop on the bandwagon for the sake of fashion or impressing others, there are myriad benefits to incorporating wearable devices into our daily routines.
With so many global users already embracing wearable devices, how will these innovative gadgets continue to revolutionize our day-to-day experiences? Let’s explore!
Wearable tech opens the possibility of simplifying daily life and helping people stay in good health. For example, fitness trackers, smartwatches, and other wearable health technology can help individuals exercise more and help them stay healthy. In addition, other forms of wearable tech, like VR goggles, can help some people reduce stress.
The range of wearable tech we come across and can wear and use personally is expanding significantly, with constant new additions. Some devices that get manufactured have particular purposes, such as fitness trackers. In contrast, others get created to help us deal with many aspects of daily life, such as smartwatches. Considering all of these additions, what are the ways wearable tech can help us?
Is Wearable Tech Helping Us With Healthcare?
When discussing the usefulness and help wearable tech gives the public and healthcare professionals in the medical and healthcare technology industry, some significant impacts need consideration. So naturally, recent pandemics and healthcare crises need to get discussed, as well as more general uses for wearable tech in daily life. For this reason, the information below got split into two categories.
What Was The Impact Of Wearable Health Technology During Covid?
According to a paper in the National Library of Medicine about the growing use of wearable tech during the Covid pandemic, there is the potential for effective use of wearable tech in the medical and healthcare field.
Focussing on recent times and large-scale worldwide and nationwide health crises, it is clear that there are many possible implementations for wearable tech. Furthermore, when discussing wearable tech in healthcare and medicine, there are also more devices to consider than the devices that generally get used by the public; some of the wearable techs in the wearable healthcare technology industry include patches, finger sensors, and wearable ECG monitors.
During the Covid pandemic alone, there was a rise in the purchase and use of oximeters. This wearable tech slips onto a person’s finger and helps determine basic health stats, including oxygen levels, measure blood pressure, collect data about heart rate, and other features. By allowing the public to purchase these devices, ones that healthcare professionals more commonly use, symptoms could get easily monitored and treated.
In addition to this example of wearable tech helping people during the Covid pandemic, many fitness tracking brands and even smartwatch brands now include oximeters in their more recent tracker models. These newer models can significantly help the public to keep track of their own health, and determine whether there is a need for medical involvement.
How Wearable Tech Impacts Daily Healthcare
If we look past the more commonly used and flashy bits of wearable tech that we love today, there are other devices that we can consider when discussing this category of wearable technology too. Some of the fantastic wearable tech devices we use today are either not seen or have been around for long enough that we don’t always consider them significant. However, these devices have an enormous impact on many.
Some of the most groundbreaking wearable tech devices today include hearing aids, insulin pumps, and even glasses that help color blind people see how they should. Taking into account the number of times these devices change, improve and even save the lives of people is essential when discussing how wearable tech can enhance our lives.
The use of wearable tech to help manage health conditions has significantly impacted healthcare providers, and these technologies are constantly expanding and improving our ability to monitor chronic health conditions. Some wearable health monitoring devices help people live relatively normal lives when in the past, they would not be able to do so or would have to monitor themselves much more than they need today.
In the same way, some of the past wearable tech devices have changed the lives of people with health conditions or other problems; new wearable medical devices will continue to make strides and help the next generations to live more comfortably. The newer tech can help others, even when they have illnesses or problems that would ordinarily keep them from living everyday or full lives.
How Does Wearable Tech Promote Fitness And Physical Health?
Looking past the other features contained within wearable fitness trackers, the main goal of these pieces of wearable medical technology is to get you fit and healthy while allowing you to see your progress and set some goals.
Though they may not be practical tools for everyone, being able to see your steps a day, and the extra boost of motivational messages and tracking your daily stats, can help you stay healthy.
In a paper published in 2022 in The Lancet Digital Health, the writers and researchers go over the findings of other research papers to determine whether or not they are reputable and what their conclusions are.
The report concludes that fitness trackers have a “moderate” impact on the health data of wearers concerning their physical activity, with an average increase of around 1800 added steps per day.
Though many people dispute whether fitness trackers and smartwatches, which allow you to keep track of your daily activity and health, significantly impact the wearer when in the right hands, they do carry a benefit.
With fitness trackers, other forms of wearable tech, and apps, people can push themselves a little more towards physical improvement. If a person is eager and able to attempt to improve their physical condition, the ease of use and measurability of success a fitness tracker provides can help them set and stick to their goals.
As explained in a video by TechRadar, if you get a fitness tracker to help you improve your life and fitness, without the right mindset, you will be sorely disappointed. To make the most of your new, wearable device or tech device, you must have the willpower to incorporate it into your life and daily schedule.
The video above also briefly discusses the importance of choosing the right fitness tracker for you, configuring the required settings, and even briefly discusses the differences between smartwatches and fitness trackers. You can use this video and the related article as a basic guideline to help you get the most out of your chosen wearable tracker or even to help you choose the right one to buy.
Does Wearable Tech Improve Productivity?
By limiting the amount of interaction an employee needs to get a task done, employees can stay more focused while also becoming more productive. Luckily, this is a field in which wearable tech is very capable of helping.
With the introduction of voice-activated wearable devices, employees can do many more tasks in less time, from dictating emails or taking notes to quickly determining what notifications are more important than others. The smartphone is a necessary part of the modern workplace but can be very distracting if you need to keep your eyes on it at all times of the day.
However, with the help of wearable tech, like smartwatches, you no longer need to fish your phone out of your pocket because your notifications will appear on your watch. By looking at the short notification you receive on your smartwatch, you can more easily determine whether it is more or less important than the task you are currently busy completing.
In the same way that your smartwatch can help you stay focused, it can also help you take notes or even write an email while you’re busy walking or doing something else, simply by using voice commands and dictation.
There are also benefits to using more advanced forms of wearable techs, such as smart glasses like the ones created by Microsoft. Though there aren’t many workplaces that currently use this much wearable technology in healthcare yet, smart glasses can open your employees to a new world of efficiency by allowing them to receive instructions while enabling them to keep working, as mentioned in a paper published by Jayden Khakurel.
There are also uses for wearable tech that has continued to get used since the early 2000’s such as Bluetooth earpieces that allow you to take a call while you are busy with something else or even while driving. The significance of keeping your hands free while doing another task, especially in the workplace, cannot be understated and is a brilliant way to increase productivity.
How Can Wearable Tech Improve Our Daily Lives?
In addition to all the other ways wearable tech can influence our lives, you can also see its use in more mundane or day-to-day activities such as unlocking your home or even paying for groceries.
Furthermore, as mentioned by GCF global in two of their articles on the matter of current wearable tech and the future of wearable tech, wearable tech is also becoming more popular for authentication and even entry into restricted areas.
One brilliant and relatively new way wearable tech gets used is to help people pay for their groceries. Connecting your smartwatch to a relevant app like Apple Pay or Samsung Pay allows you to leave your bank card or cash at home and use your watch to tap a machine that will authorize an online transaction quickly. This feature allows you the comfort and ease of having empty pockets and speeding up shopping.
In addition to this simple example, authentication rings and other wearable devices have become more common, allowing you to wear a ring to unlock your house door or enter a concert without a key or ticket. Not only does this allow you to speed up the process, but it also makes it much less stressful and considerably faster.
Other devices like smart glasses allow you to read more about the products you want to buy simply by using your glasses to scan a code on the packaging, allowing you to have near-instant access to all the information you need before making a purchase. With all of these uses and more, there are few limits to how wearable devices can improve your daily life.
Conclusion
Wearable medical devices that are constantly getting better and can make our daily lives easier, quicker, and less stressful. From using wearable tech in the workplace, for the healthcare industry, or even for fitness, there is almost no limit to the possible advantages it can bring. Though the possibilities are endless regarding the benefits of wearable tech, is there a specific feature you would like to see?
