Most smartwatch brands have been moving towards the healthcare market by developing new and more advanced vital sign monitoring technologies. Apple already monitor’s your blood pressure and gives you alerts if you are outside the normal decile range and now AT&T and Samsung are moving forward to join in on the market.
AT&T will shortly be launching their smartwatch, OnePulse. It will transmit the patient’s data to a cloud-based system, allowing medical professionals to remote monitor their patient’s health. The watch is also Bluetooth enabled allowing it to sync with your other medical devices you might use i.e. blood pressure cuff, glucometer and weight scale. Besides giving access to your physician, you will also be able to provide alerts to family members on your current state of health.
Samsung will be releasing similar health tools like Apple. Their Galaxy Watch Active will monitor users blood pressure and connect to their new application, My BP Lab App. Users will be able to monitor their blood pressure from their wrist.
Existing providers of Bluetooth enabled sport and health monitoring watches, such as FitBit, need to be aware of their increasing competition. Staying ahead in this rapidly evolving space could difficult to achieve. However, failure to do so will ultimately prove to be an existential fight.
Here are some stories of how a smartwatch helped individual’s lives:
- April 2018: A teenaged named Deanna Recktenwald was alerted on her Apple watch to “Seek Medical Attention” after her resting heart rate hit 190 beats per minute. She went to an urgent care and later the emergency room with her mother and was diagnosed with kidney failure. Deanna said that she did not even feel any symptoms of anything but luckily she was alerted.
- December 2018: A New Jersey woman, Christina Ling, watch also alerted her that her heart rate was 150 even though she had been sitting for 10 minutes. Thankfully she listened to the alert and went to a hospital where they found out she had a cardiac tamponade, abnormal fluid around the heart.
- Also during 2018, a gentleman named Michael Glenn was alerted by his Fitbit that his heart rate was 40 beats per minute which is highly below the normal range. He had to be convinced by his wife to go to the hospital. Glenn had to be immediately airlifted for emergency surgery after he found out his right coronary artery was 100% blocked and his central artery was 80 % blocked.
The era of the smart watch has arrived. How far will it take us? When will the likes of Epic and Cerner integrate the data and monitoring systems from these watches? Would or do you trust the information you get from your own smartwatch?
This article was created by Stephanie Sok, Business Researcher, Global Healthcare IT, Inc. with assistance of Michael Williams, CEO, GHIT, Inc. and from the following base line articles: For more on each please click on the link.
Stephanie can be reached on ssok@globalhit.com.
