With wearable sports and activity trackers expected to become a $1.4 billion industry in less than two years, healthcare providers are wondering how they might fit into the clinical landscape.
The answer may very well lie with analytics – taking data from those devices and making it useful for doctors. Earlier this year Vinod Khosla, one of Sun Microsystems co-founders, predicted that over the next decade data analytics "will do more for medicine than all of the biological sciences together."
"We are still scratching the surface on the value of patient-reported data," said Harry Greenspun, senior advisor at Deloitte's Center for Health Solutions, in a Q&A with mHealth News. "The innovation that will make it worthwhile is applied analytics to help individuals and providers makes sense out of it and generate a plan of action."
A Canadian company is launching a platform that aims to capitalize on that trend.
Calgary-based Vivametrica is rolling out a device-agnostic platform that its founders hope will bridge the gap between the FitBits and Jawbones of the world and electronic health records. Co-founder Richard Hu, a clinical professor of surgery at the University of Calgary, says the data found on most wearable devices "is very modest in terms of complexity," and needs to be curated, analyzed and annotated to become useful to clinicians.
"It needs to be … meaningful to them," said Hu, who will market the platform to consumers as well as providers, payers and corporate health plans on a "data-as-a-service" model. While providing personalized risk assessments for consumers, Vivametrica will integrate that information into the EHR so that it can correspond with a clinician's or payer's care management plan for patients and members.
Hu said the wearable device market has exploded over the past year or two – but only on the consumer side of things. The public is intrigued by the latest devices for measuring exercise, vital signs, even moods and diet, added company president Scott Valentine, while providers have been sitting back and waiting for the software to catch up with the hardware.
"The hardware is actually irrelevant," said Hu, adding that Vivametrica's platform is designed to accommodate any and all devices on the market. "It's the quality of the data coming (from these devices) that's important to (clinicians)."
To wit: The best new smartwatch, wrist band or attachable sensor might be great at measuring heart rate, respiration rate or blood pressure, but those numbers alone won't mean a thing to providers. A doctor might want to see how that data can be used to spot unhealthy activities or exacerbate chronic conditions; to do that, he or she will need an analytics platform that spots trends.
Hu said this is where the wearable devices market is headed – and this is what will make healthcare officials sit up and take notice.
"We envision that there's going to be many different categories of data" to analyze, Hu said.
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