Research shows that 50% of companies expect a boost in productivity by improving the connection workers have to resources and to each other. Here are some major ways wearables are going to impact the future of workplaces, as well as some foreseen issues and challenges to prepare for.

Improved Safety

Many workplaces involve a lower level of safety, especially those that require fieldwork or work with heavy machinery. Wearables offer employers real-time insights into business operations; by personalizing and configuring wearables to each employee’s needs and specifications, as well as job safety levels. Workplace injuries cost companies millions of dollars every year from personnel loss and insurance, but we can reduce the number of incidents with wearables.

Wearables can include haptic feedback if the employee is behaving in an unsafe manner or entering an unsafe location. Employers can also have wearables monitor and record which tasks workers are performing, and make a mark whenever a task is performed incorrectly. This can be analyzed later by day, week, month, or year to see what actions or behavior lead to poor or inefficient performance and a higher risk of injury. By identifying high-risk employees, the employer can allocate more budget for training and tools, lessening fatigue, and improving productivity. The simple act of tracking and mitigating specific risks can greatly reduce workplace incidents.

Preventing COVID-19 Risk

Speaking of improved workplace safety, using wearables can help employees track how often they were within six feet of a customer. It’s difficult for medium- and large-sized businesses to keep everything sanitized all the time. But reducing the number of people served on a daily basis can also mean the difference between staying open for another month or closing doors permanently.

Wearables can be used to grant access wirelessly to employees, like opening doors for them when they’re approaching. By keeping employees moving, we can reduce the amount of contact they have with hard surfaces. If an employee gets infected with COVID-19, wearables that measure and track body temperature and other vitals can alert the employer when an employee shows an abnormally high body temperature.

More Effective Training

It’s interesting how a medical application like wearables can affect workplaces of all sorts in a variety of ways. One of the coolest ways is through improved training. We can use wearables to elevate specific employee training through immersive task simulations, for example. To prevent a new employee from being gone all day shadowing a senior employee, we can use wearables to create a realistic simulation of a task that they would encounter in their day-to-day responsibilities of the job. We can wave outdated training videos goodbye and usher in a more engaging way of onboarding an employee: allowing the new worker to venture down their own decision-making path to chart their own course of action. This type of training can accomplish in a few days what shadowing a senior employee for weeks can.

Increased Productivity

Wearables allow employers to increase efficiency and productivity through a few channels. For example, the devices can speed up production, which decreases costs, operational expenses, and reduces strain on workers. Wearables can also be used to automated processes that were previously manual, help collect and share data on a local network, and develop a more hands-free environment for employees. Using wearables to simulate environments for testing new products can reduce the product design lifecycle, improve design accuracy, and enable faster user feedback. Simulations through wearables also reduce the need for physical prototypes, which take up quite a lot of time and budget in product design.

The Future of Wearables in the Workplace

Wearables in the workplace may not be perceived warmly by every employee, and rightfully so: the devices introduce a much higher level of data collection and concerns around security and privacy. Employers will need to invest heavily in improved cybersecurity on their network, IoT systems, and for each wearable device to prevent private employee information, financials, and sensitive business data from being accessed. Other major requirements for investment by employers are IoT management, compliance, maintenance, and more.

But the potential for wearables to bring about improved employee productivity, reduced safety risk, better COVID-19 safety, and more immersive training is well worth the time, investment, and ethical considerations. Wearables will fit nicely into existing IoT ecosystems, allowing companies to manage all devices (wearable or not) from one location and application. We already see how wearables are bringing about positive change with police recording their interactions with the public, hospital employees using wireless pendants to improve the patient experience and streamline communication, and field workers to be alerted to possible dangers like changes in the weather in tornado country. After the pandemic ends, wearables will become more commonplace in the workplace and will be used for unique purposes for each department and in each company.

Would you wear a wearable device for your employer during your time at your workplace? Why or why not?

From their inception, it was immediately obvious that wearables had immense potential to improve how we interact with medical apps. These sleek and stylish devices could not only make technology more widely accessible, but they could also allow us to understand our own health in a more intimate, digestible way. Dogtown Media has always striven to keep up and innovate with the latest developments in wearable technology. That’s why we’re so excited and honored to announce that we’ve recognized as a top wearable app developer of 2020 by TopDevelopers.co!

Since we opened our doors in 2011, the wearables market has witnessed unprecedented growth. The explosive popularity of these devices has led to countless advancements which now present endless opportunities for augmenting preventative medicine. With that said, it’s safe to say that the days of viewing wearables as mere fitness trackers are over — this technology can give you a comprehensive picture of your health that wasn’t possible only a few years ago.

Wearables unlock insights that allow anyone to take better control of their health. They can also elucidate better ways for medical experts to manage maladies. It’s no exaggeration to say that these benefits are priceless. But this is really just the beginning; we expect wearables to radically expand in functionality and capability over the next few years.

TopDevelopers.co assessed several wearable app developers to identify the pioneers in this field. Ultimately, they had to drastically cut down their list of candidates to companies that demonstrated not only substantial experience in this field but also a proven track record of consistent client satisfaction. We’re extremely proud that our Los Angeles-based development studio made the cut!

Besides being recognized as a top wearable app developer of 2020, Dogtown Media has also had the pleasure of being featured as one of the best B2B service providers in California by Clutch as well as a leading IoT app developer by TopDevelopers.co!

At a time when it has become painfully clear that more medical innovation is sorely needed, we’re committed to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with wearable technology. We’d like to extend our thanks to TopDevelopers.co once again for recognizing our work. We’d also like to thank our clients, team, and community — we couldn’t have done it without you!

Who is TopDevelopers.co?

TopDevelopers.co is a widely respected directory and review platform for B2B IT service providers. They take a neutral approach to analyzing companies. The team of analysts at TopDevelopers.co vets organizations through stringent parameters which ensure that only the most competitive firms, businesses, enterprises, and entrepreneurs are filtered through their process. This helps service seekers find the most appropriate solutions for their needs.

Thousands of people around the world have taken a more proactive approach to their health thanks to wearables. Through a combination of the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and health app development, these devices allow users to monitor their steps taken, calories burned, heart rates, and more. But just how accurate are they?

In a recent post, we examined how wearables actually “count” your steps and why this metric can be way off the mark. If you missed this article, you can read it here. For this entry, we’ll explore how wearables track heart and calorie burn rates. We’ll also delve into some of the factors that can make these readings inaccurate.

Why Your Heart Rate Readings May Be Haywire

Ever heard of photoplethysmography (PPG)? Don’t fret if you haven’t — it’s an obscure term outside of medicine (and a mouthful to pronounce). PPG refers to the technique that most wearable devices use to measure heart rate.

By beaming a green LED into your wrist, PPG enables wearables to measure your blood volume. Every time your heart beats, more blood flows into your blood vessels. A proportional amount of the green LED’s light is absorbed by this blood. In between heart beats, your blood recedes away from your vessels, causing less light to be absorbed. Wearable devices use this difference in light absorption to calculate your heart rate.

This is certainly one of the most elegant uses of IoT development and sensors in healthcare. But it’s not without its faults. In fact, green LED sensors can be quite unreliable. To measure blood volume properly, the green light must penetrate the skin. But several studies have found that melanated skin is actually more likely to absorb it.

It’s important to note that this is still a hotly-debated topic. For instance, one study didn’t identify any correlation between skin color and accuracy. But it did report an activity error rate 30% higher than when at rest. And other research found that the Apple Watch performed quite well, regardless of skin tone.

Honing in on Your Heart Beat

To address this potential issue, Fitbit works hard on calibrating its device sensors to work accurately for everybody; the company says that the green light its wearables emit are sufficiently strong enough to penetrate through darker skin, and its sensor is receptive enough to accurately detect heart rate signals. But many users with melanated skin have complained that wearables from the San Francisco developer either gave wrong readings or didn’t work at all.

Mikael Mattsson is a Senior Research at Swedish university Karolinska Institutet. He explains that, in research settings, scientists typically calibrate and use seven different light wavelengths to capture accurate results. But fitting all of these capabilities in a small wearable is impossible.

To circumvent this, the Apple Watch doesn’t only rely on green LEDs to measure your resting heart rate; it also employs infrared sensors. While more reliable and accurate than green light, Mattsson says that movement can still cause this to measure vitals incorrectly. Apple seems to be well-aware of this issue; the Apple Watch Series 4 measures your heart’s electrical current directly via electrodes instead of relying on proxy blood level measurements.

But even with more bells and whistles, the accuracy of wrist-worn wearables can vary depending on the type of actions you’re doing. Stable, repetitive activities such as stationary biking are usually fine. But even other relatively controlled exercises like using an elliptical machine with arm levers can throw your wearables a curveball.

For this reason, Mattsson hasn’t even begun to test wearables outdoors yet. Why? “If they’re not good enough indoors, they won’t be good enough outdoors,” he explains. The lesson here is this: Wearables’ heart rate monitor can adequately function under specific conditions and are completely fine for casual use. Just know that they’re still not perfect.

These Same Inaccuracies Make Calorie Burn Rate Unreliable

If you were holding out hope that wearables track your calorie burn rate accurately, we’ve got some bad news from you. Many of these devices utilize proprietary algorithms to calculate your energy expenditure — and these algorithms factor in movement and heart rate measurements (which we all know by now can be quite erroneous).

To make calorie burn estimations more precise, numerous wearables take physical aspects such as height, weight, sex, and age into account. This enables the devices to calculate your basal metabolic rate, the usual number of calories you’d normally burn each day. But throw in the calories expended from physical exertion, and the whole equation goes awry. That’s because this is the most unreliable metric that wearables calculate.

In a study of a diverse set of people of different skin tones, fitness levels, weights, heights, and ages, Mattsson and his colleagues found that all wearables had a 20% or higher error rate for calorie burn calculations. Other studies have reported similar inaccuracies.

Mattsson believes the main problem lies in the proxy measurements and algorithms. The former gives the latter bad measurements to use in its calculations. But algorithms are already doomed from the start. “The biggest problem is that they’ve done the algorithms for a subset of people,” Mattsson says. “In most studies, you talk about white males in their 30s at an average fitness level. The farther away you get, the bigger the risk of a problem.”

The Catch-22 Facing Wearables

These problems of inaccurate readings put wearables in a perplexing conundrum. To improve their offerings, wearable developers need a diverse group of people purchasing and using their products. This, in turn, would give the developer more diverse data to train the algorithms with. But here’s the catch: People would have to use these devices, even if they’re not perfect.

Like before, the main takeaway from all of this is that wearable data must be taken in context. They can certainly inform and provide a person with a better picture of his or her health. Numerous people around the world have turned their lives around thanks to wearables. But, as with any new technology, fallibility is still present.

Wearables are one of the greatest technological marvels of our time. Emerging from a combination of the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and health app development, these devices were originally employed to track steps. But those days are long gone — wearable technology has transcended this single use case to become something much more.

Now, people around the world are using them to take a more proactive approach to their health by measuring their heart rates, sleep patterns, and calories burned. These devices are even playing integral roles in research experiments, clinical trials, and corporate wellness programs.

But just how accurate are commercial wearables, really? It turns out that a number of seemingly insignificant factors such as darker skin, pushing a shopping cart or stroller, or just shuffling while you walk can skew your data.

Wearables Don’t Count — They Approximate

In 2019, researchers conducted an accuracy study of consumer- and research-grade wearables when used by older adults. 18 senior citizens took part. After being strapped with trackers on their wrists, ankles, belts, and chests, they were tasked with strolling on a treadmill. But none of the gadgets displayed an accurate step count.

It turns out that the participants’ movements were too slow to trigger the sensors in all of the devices. Fast forward to today, and it’s now becoming clear that various factors can make your wearable’s tracking capabilities go awry. To get the most accurate results, you have to fit into quite a narrow demographic: Have a light skin tone, be in your 20s or 30s, possess an average fitness level, and walk with a “purposeful” gait.

If you can check all those boxes, then odds are good that your wearable tracking will work better. With that said, it’s worth noting that wearables don’t exactly count every step; they actually approximate them using an accelerometer. Commonly used in IoT development, these electromagnetic sensors can pick up on motion.

When the accelerometer detects motion, the wearable then interprets the information using an algorithm that has been trained to recognize what constitutes a step. With personalized data such as a user’s height, weight, and age, these calculations can be customized to be more precise.

Your Data Is a Reflection of How You Move

But personal information about the user can only get us so far. To see why wearables can oftentimes be inaccurate, we must investigate how the algorithms they utilize are trained.

Lynne Feehan is an Associate Professor of the University of British Columbia’s Physical Therapy Department and the co-author of a Fitbit accuracy study. She says that the algorithms employed by wearables are usually based on data obtained from studies on college-aged men.

“They [wearables] do detect steps well if it’s normal paced steps, normal cadence,” Feehan explains. “They were designed to measure purposeful walking.” But if you’re prone to shuffling or taking small steps, or if you find yourself pushing a walker or shopping cart, the accelerometer probably won’t be as accurate. “There’s a definite bias in there. How a child moves and how someone who’s 90 moves is very different,” says Feehan.

Shelten Yuen, the Vice President of Research at San Francisco-based Fitbit, says that the company continuously strives to enhance its algorithms: “Fitbit uses AI and machine learning, coupled with insights from its large database of biometric information to develop and continually improve its offerings.”

Walk with intent while thrusting your arm forward with each step, and your wearable will most likely sense and record the movement correctly. But if you don’t move your arms much while in motion, have a limp, or just like to stroll leisurely, it’s safe to assume that your data is thrown off a bit. More specifically, Feehan and her colleagues found that Fitbits under-recorded steps by older adults by as much as 25%.

Accounting for Inaccuracy

In their study, Feehan and her co-authors also discovered some other startling results. For instance, the wearables tended to only have acceptable accuracy one-third to one-half of the time! While walking normally or jogging in the lab environment, they would undercount steps 50% of the time. Outside of lab conditions, they’d overcount steps by as much as 35%. Fitbit has declined to comment on this and other individual studies.

And in case you were looking for unethical ways to increase your step count (say, for a workplace-sponsored fitness program), wearables also tend to be fairly easy to fool. Attaching them to metronomes or spinning them around with drills or bicycle wheels can all do the trick.

None of this is to say that wearables don’t provide value. On the contrary, they’ve helped thousands of people lead healthier lives. If you want to compare your activity levels day by day, these devices are indispensable. However, if you’re specifically aiming for a goal like 10,000 steps a day, you may want to take your results with a grain of salt.

Stay Tuned and Stay Healthy

We hope you’ve enjoyed this brief overview of how well wearables count steps. Stay tuned! Next week, we’ll delve into how capable these devices are of tracking heart rate and caloric burn.

Do you use a wearable? Have you found it to be accurate? How would you improve your device? As always, let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

When Dogtown Media first opened its doors in 2011, we knew that wearables were something special; it was immediately obvious that these devices held immense potential for improving how we interact with medical apps and our own health. Since those early days, we’ve striven to keep up and innovate with the latest developments in this technology.

And it appears our hard work is paying off — TopDevelopers.co has recognized Dogtown Media as a leading wearable app developer!

Over the past few years, it’s been a pleasure to watch the growth of the wearables market. The sharp increase in the usage of wearable devices has been accompanied by numerous possibilities being opened up for medicine. This technology is no longer just for simple fitness tracking. Wearables can now give you a holistic perspective of your health.

Such insights enable anyone to take control of their health and shine a light on better ways for doctors to manage medical maladies. These advantages are priceless. But perhaps most surprising is that this is just the tip of the iceberg of what wearables are capable of; expect the features of these devices to expand in a multitude of ways over the next few years.

TopDevelopers.co evaluated numerous wearable app developers to identify the pioneers in this field. Ultimately, they had to trim down their list to organizations with substantial experience in this niche and a long history of consistent client satisfaction. It’s an absolute honor that our Los Angeles-based development studio made the cut!

Besides being dubbed a top wearable app developer, Dogtown Media was also recently named a top U.S. mobile app developer by TopDevelopers.co. We were also fortunate to be lauded as one of California’s leading app developers by Clutch!

At a time where it has become readily apparent that more medical innovation is sorely needed, we’re proud to say that we’ll keep on trying our best to push the boundaries of what’s possible with wearable technology.

Thanks so much to TopDevelopers.co for recognizing us. We’d also like to thank our clients, team, and community — we couldn’t have done it without you!

Who is TopDevelopers.co?

TopDevelopers.co is a widely respected directory and review platform for B2B IT service providers. They take a neutral approach to analyzing companies. The team of analysts at TopDevelopers.co vets organizations through stringent parameters which ensure that only the most competitive firms, businesses, enterprises, and entrepreneurs are filtered through their process. This helps service seekers find the most appropriate solutions for their needs.

If these numbers astound you, consider that the global Internet of Things (IoT) industry is forecasted by experts to connect over 20 billion devices and sensors by the end of this year; that amounts to 1 to 2 for every person in the world.

Many of these devices will come in the form of wearables. It’s imperative that we think deeply about how we utilize this technology — it could have a monumental impact on our health and environment.

Proliferation of Mobile

As smartphones become more affordable and accessible through the improvement of mobile networks and infrastructure, we’ve also seen rapid growth in wearable technology.

Wearables are devices that are worn on the body, as clothes or as accessories. The smartwatch has been the most successful wearable thus far, but many innovative companies have released smart jewelry, glasses, handbags, clothes, and other apparel.

Experts forecast that wearables will become more popular and ubiquitous in the future, eventually permeating every facet of human life. But this prediction could come with consequences.

Researchers like Andreas Köhler, Ph.D. pointed out almost a decade ago (in 2013) that electronics are made of scarce materials that can cause a shortage of supplies in the future; these electronics are very difficult to recycle and reuse when they die, and the global economy and society have become reliant on these products.

Many scientists, like Köhler, believe that industrial and IoT developers, engineers, and designers need to heed the scarcity of these materials and make alternative choices when possible. Developing electronics with a lifecycle that ends with recycling is also a priority to create a more sustainable market for wearables to flourish in. These changes require a change in supply chain logistics as well as our mindsets.

Overcoming Sustainability Challenges

Combining textiles with electronics creates a massive problem for the environment. Since mobile phones and wearables are short-lived electronic goods (especially compared to laptops/desktops, TVs, and even tablets), their product cycles are shorter. We often get bombarded to buy the newest phone model once every year or once every year and a half.

Creating the ambiance of “fast fashion” for consumers in regards to wearables can lead to wearables getting dumped into the landfill. They would become a mass-consumed and mass-disposal electronic product.

What’s worse is that wearables (and essentially all electronics) further deteriorate our environment, society, and human health by increasing the difficulty of recycling electronic waste, scarce resource consumption, and power consumption.

Without a proper lifecycle that ends with recycling scarce materials, we’re further damaging the environment and human lives in generating demand for difficult-to-obtain materials. Without recycling, just as we’ve seen with plastic waste, our wearables would ultimately end up in our water, air, and soil, increasing the number, frequency, and severity of health problems for humans.

Wearables also perpetuate the idea of an always-online culture, which harms human culture, interaction, and mental health.

Adding to everything above, the aspect of data security and privacy is always lurking in the background for emerging technologies. A data leak or loss of data security has real-life implications for users who are impacted.

Opportunities to Improve Sustainability

Experts straddle the line on wearables; many believe that wearables will disrupt how consumers currently shop for products.

If done right, wearables would have a longer lifespan, which would help consumers reframe their view of mobile electronic products. In fact, if manufacturers were able to source more durable material and improve the user’s awareness and knowledge of cleaning and maintaining their wearable device, wearables could last each consumer much longer.

To truly improve the consumption rate of electronics, software compatibility and multi-platform support must be available at any given time. The product and the product’s company should constantly adapt to users’ changing wants and needs.

Research shows that when a product meets the user’s needs and lifestyle and has a meaning for the user, an emotional attachment is created. With an emotional attachment, products have a much longer lifetime.

Medical developers working on health- and fitness-related wearables should build as much customization into the product as possible to allow for the user to become more in tune with it. At our Los Angeles-based mobile app development studio, we work with our clients to brainstorm as many features and data analysis as we can for the user to benefit from.

As a result, society experiences fewer health problems, an improved process for aging, and decreased healthcare costs. These changes directly improve quality of life and open the door for telehealth and preventative medicine.

The User’s Role

Much of the onus on our mass-consumer culture (especially in regards to electronics) rests on us as the consumers. If we didn’t validate the short electronic lifecycle by buying the latest model when it comes out, we could send the right message to the company.

All told, the consumer’s behavior will determine how sustainable wearable products can be. Even if every single wearable was designed with the least scarce resources, if consumers don’t adapt their behavior to buy electronics less often, we won’t see any improvement for the environment and human health.

At this point in time, wearables could be on the right track if we (as users and consumers) take care of them, use them longer, adopt them more slowly, and dispose of them responsibly.

Original Article Featured in Guidepoint.

Wearables are making an unprecedented impact on the medical field. Users are able to form a more complete picture of their health, and physicians are able to glean insights and take action faster. Countless opportunities have opened up for innovators to improve how we manage medical maladies. Are you ready for a healthier future?

A SHIFT FROM FITNESS TO MEDICINE

In the early days of wearables, devices like the Fitbit enabled users to track basic metrics such as step count from their wrists. Not long after, both consumers and innovators realized that wearables could do much more. This was the advent of medical wearables, and it hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down.

Some forecasts predict that the medical wearables market will surpass $14 billion by 2024. Other experts, like Juniper Research, believe this breakneck growth will make spending on these devices reach $60 billion by 2023. While projections vary, one thing is clear — healthcare wearables are becoming more ubiquitous.

To cement themselves a place in the future of medical wearables, companies like Apple, Biotronik, and Garmin are doubling down on their research and development in this space. As a result, wearables are not only becoming smarter but also more comfortable and less obtrusive. Patients can now incorporate these devices into their lifestyles with minimal effort and a massive return on investment.

A MORE HOLISTIC PICTURE OF YOUR HEALTH

In the past, the onus of noticing and reporting symptoms solely rested on the patient. From there, the healthcare provider would need to conduct examinations and tests to decide the best treatment plan. Today, healthcare wearables can paint a more accurate, comprehensive picture of a patient’s health than the limited snapshot offered in a single medical appointment. In turn, hidden patterns can be uncovered, medical conditions can be elucidated, and both physicians and patients can become more informed.

With a built-in EKG sensor, the Apple Watch is a prime example of these capabilities in practice for detecting to heart disease, which accounts for one out of four deaths in America. In a study of 400,000 Apple Watch users, researchers found that the device detected irregular heartbeats in 0.5% of participants extremely accurately; 84 percent of that 0.5% were flagged and confirmed to be having a real medical event.

TRANSFORMING DATA INTO REAL-TIME ACTION

Remote monitoring is an amazing medical development, but all the data in the world is worthless without action. By monitoring a patient’s vitals in real time, wearables can act as the first line of defense in an emergency. For example, Dogtown Media, my mobile technology firm, created a wearable alert ecosystem for patients suffering from chronic illnesses.

If a patient’s health starts trending downwards, medical attention is needed fast. This goes for whether the patient is having a heart attack in their sleep, their blood glucose level drops, or they fall out of bed and hurt themselves. As soon as this happens, our system automatically notifies a caregiver, family member, or doctor of the emergency. If there is no response, the system then contacts a nearby medical facility to dispatch an ambulance to the device’s GPS location.

Seconds and minutes matter in these events. Fortunately, wearables can not only alert healthcare providers instantly, but they can also equip them with the information needed to tailor treatment plans for optimal success. This means there’s no wasted time when it comes to saving lives. And the patient’s loved ones can have peace of mind knowing they’ll be alerted at the first sign of an emergency.

A HEALTHIER FUTURE FOR ALL

Medical wearables are a ripe frontier that any ambitious entrepreneur or innovative provider should consider exploring. This technology is allowing more people to leverage higher-quality healthcare, and it’s also expanding beyond the smartwatch to help with a variety of medical issues. Organizations around the world are finally realizing the true potential of medical wearables, and they’re bringing the right dose of innovation to make it a reality.

Consider the MiniMed 670G, a smart blood glucose monitor that checks a diabetic user’s blood sugar every five minutes and administers insulin as needed. Or check out Biotronik’s BioMonitor 2, an implantable heart monitoring device that’s more accurate than a wrist-based monitor and can transmit data daily for up to four years. There’s even clothing in development, such as a smart fabric from Dartmouth College which helps physical therapy patients expedite recoveries.

The list of medical wearable applications is endless, and the sky is truly the limit for this technology. By transforming real-time medical data into actionable insights, wearables are allowing us to take control of our health. We’re entering a new era of medicine — one in which preventative healthcare is becoming the standard.

Although many wearables come with mobile connectivity, most of us are tethering our wearables to our phone through Bluetooth connectivity. And it was only recently that the wearables market upgraded from 3G to 4G. But these wearables are just the beginning of connectivity and tracking.

With 5G implementation on the horizon for many large cities, experts expect the functionality, capacity, and nature of wearables to improve drastically. These devices will hardly be seen as fitness trackers anymore — 5G will open up unprecedented opportunities for medical application development. And for industrial applications for manufacturers and companies, wearables will encompass new features and uses that were previously never even fathomed.

Wearables Will Never Be the Same

5G promises more stable mobile connections with low latency and high speeds, and it’s going to change how we consume, run business, and how we take care of ourselves. 5G will transform healthcare and the patient experience, entire industries, and how we communicate with our friends and family.

In wearables, 5G will bring real-time notifications, more precision, and richer data and insights into our health, surroundings, wellness, and goals. IoT (The Internet of Things) systems often work with a multitude of sensors, from basic switches to complex cameras recording at set intervals. Using this model of combining sensor information to create a more cohesive picture of our bodies and well-being, wearables will become much more powerful and valuable to us on a personal level.

With 5G connectivity, wearables will be able to compute more, require less charging, and constantly add more heavy features to their devices. Eventually, wearables will even be able to upgrade their software on their own, without needing your cell phone to be nearby.

This will be possible in large part by edge computing, which allows sensors and devices to make computations and decisions on the device itself, saving time, network bandwidth, and server space by not sending data to or requesting data from the cloud.

Ultimately, wearables will one day include AI and data analytics in their software, and the potential for innovation will go through the roof. For employees receiving wearables from their company, new and novel IoT applications will be downloaded onto their wearables for even more insight into workplace stress, schedules, and productivity.

Time is Everything

One way to imagine the endless possibilities is to think about how 5G-connected wearables can transform how we view the New York City Marathon. Right now, pace times and running positions are calculated manually, by taking time stamps from videos and looking to see who’s at the front and when.

But with 5G-enabled wearables, running routes can be tracked, paces can be seen in real-time on TV, vital signs can be followed, and it’ll be obvious who’s in first place at what times.

And the benefits of these marathon wearables extend past the marathon viewers, too; the runners themselves could use this marathon data during the next year of training regimens, keep an eye on their own vitals, performance, energy, and weather.

Sean Harrington is vice president of City Solutions at Verizon. He says, “The network is critical for moving raw data from infrastructure to the cloud and then sending metadata back again. As bandwidth demands and the need for time-critical responses increases, 5G becomes extraordinarily important.”

Healthcare’s Transformation

By 2022, a recent study says, the wearables market will almost quadruple to 430 million devices. Experts believe this big increase will come from a boost in interest for health solutions, rather than fitness applications.

Regardless of consumer interest, fitness and health applications will output almost clinical-grade data, giving us (and our doctors) deeper insights into our bodies and health. Eventually, we’ll be able to send our nurse and doctor our vitals without missing a minute.

Having data about our bodies can also help our providers diagnose us faster by reducing the number of appointments we make. This would free up a lot of time for providers to spend on their own mental health and work-life balance.

Indeed, a report by McKinsey & Company shows that if 15 to 20% of the current amount of outpatient consultations and home visits were to convert into video chats, we’d save $25 billion to $40 billion on healthcare spending annually.

For retirement homes and elderly patients, 5G-enabled wearables could give peace of mind to family near and far. If something small but unhealthy were to occur (sudden drop in blood pressure, body not responding to the most recent dose of medication, or a fall that produces an injury), everyone involved in the medical plan would be notified immediately.

5G is On the Horizon

5G will take a few years to fully cover all rural areas with at-risk populations. But 5G is expected to eventually connect up to one million devices per square kilometer, so there’s no doubt that it’ll be able to take over a ton of 4G network bandwidth. This new technology will transform healthcare and medicine, alongside many other industries.

Ultimately, wearables will be able to communicate with IoT devices like cars, home systems, and more. This connection could save thousands of lives, for example, by helping our car realize there’s a pedestrian crossing soon or a cyclist in foggy conditions. It would also save money and time for the average consumer. At home, for example, wearables may communicate with your smart thermostat to increase the temperature because your temperature shows as cold.

With 5G, wearables will become completely ubiquitous, and by the time we start a new decade in 2030, we’ll be wondering how we ever lived without them in the first place.

This article was originally featured on The Next Web.

One of the latest updates to the Apple Watch included FDA-approved ECG monitoring, and it made waves in both the consumer and medical communities.

Many people thought this was impossible. Some were worried about false positives. But most were excited about the potential good that a widely used device with an ECG monitor might be able to do. Once the product was released, users quickly saw the benefits, and some even credited the watch with saving their lives.

In theory, Apple’s ECG monitor shouldn’t cause such a stir. After all, the Apple Watch isn’t the first device of its kind on the market. But if you look past the surface level, you’ll see why the Apple Watch garnered this monumental momentum.

Unlike most companies, Apple inherently understands that functionality is only one part of what makes a product successful. The other crucial component is design.

Why design is so important

It’s fair to stop and ask why design matters so much when it comes to wearable medical devices. After all, the point of these devices is to help patients live healthy lives, not outsell tech giants and look sleek.

But there’s something missing in that logic. It ignores one vital fact: It doesn’t matter how effective a device is if no one wants to use it.

In my experience, clunky, poorly designed medical devices only result in frustration, misuse, and total abandonment — even when doing so has immense potential repercussions for users’ health.

That said, design actually determines whether life-saving technology ever gets the chance to save lives at all.

The difficulty in design for wearable healthcare technology

Design problems in the medical community are rooted in more than just engineers not caring how a product looks or a lack of talented user interface designers in the field. Those are baseless ideas.

The actual problem is that, frankly, it’s difficult to create a usable, effective product that’s comfortable to wear and stylish enough not to feel self-conscious about.

I’ve seen plenty of wearables fail because they didn’t include one or more of these essential elements, both in consumer markets and the medical community. Whether it’s fitness devices that cause rashes, augmented reality glasses that earn wearers a rather unfortunate nickname, or skin patches that either fall off too easily or cause serious irritation, the world of wearables is littered with products that almost hit the mark but ultimately aren’t up to snuff.

These devices are seen and heard and felt — and not in the way you want. They’re also great examples of why invisibility is so important in the design of medical wearables. If the technology is going to impact its users, it has to be as inconspicuous as possible.

There’s also the added design hurdle of earning FDA approval. Regulations make keeping up with the latest technology that much harder, giving consumer products that don’t have to meet them a chance to get ahead.

All of these things often leave medical device manufacturers feeling like it’s easier to focus on function over form, and hope the effectiveness of the product outweighs its poor usability. Unfortunately, this mentality puts lives at risk. Devices that can detect early indicators of a stroke or cardiac arrest, for instance, have the potential to save lives — but only if people are willing to wear them.

Invisibility is the key to making devices usable

Designer Joe Sparano once said, “Good design is obvious, great design is transparent.” What he meant was that the most well-designed products are so easy to use that consumers don’t even notice all the work that went into them.

For medical device developers, this quote must be a mantra.

This doesn’t mean healthcare companies or medical manufacturers are out of luck. Rather, it means they should take a page from Silicon Valley’s product development playbook if they want to create their own compelling offerings that can actually compete.

The best wearable healthcare devices tend to be passive, with most of the monitoring happening in the background. You don’t need to turn something on and off, position it in a certain spot, or let it know what you’re doing — you just wear it, and it collects and analyzes the data without you knowing.

Think of it this way: if it’s as invisible as possible, users are more likely to wear it on a regular basis, precisely because they’ll forget that they’re wearing it at all.

It takes roughly seven seconds to make a first impression. When it comes to medical wearables, those seven seconds are all about design. And they can mean the difference between a product that gets the chance to save lives and one that gets left by the wayside.

If medical device manufacturers are serious about creating a new era of better health through wearable technology, they have to pay attention to unobtrusive design and make it critical to their mission. Only then will they be able to break into the field and change — or save — lives.

Do you have an idea for a disruptive medical device, but you don’t know where to begin? Dogtown Media is an FDA-compliant developer with extensive experience in bringing health tech innovations to life.

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Naturally, this acquisition comes with data privacy and anti-trust concerns. Experts say that it will undergo more scrutiny before fully going through. Google is already trying to get ahead of these worries; the company pledged it wouldn’t use Fitbit’s health data for advertising. Of course, many remain skeptical.

Google’s Current Woes

Recent years have not been kind to Google’s reputation. In 2018, the EU fined the company almost $5 billion for violating anti-trust laws. Google appealed in October 2018 and said EU users would be offered an alternate browser and search engine to comply with the EU’s laws.

Despite setbacks like this, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Google are intent on entering the health tech space and have spent a ton of time, money, and effort trying to do so. For instance, Verily, an Alphabet company, is working on smart blood sugar devices and smart lenses for age-related eyesight issues.

Regarding the Fitbit acquisition, due to the looming issues Google is facing, Google filed a deal with the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission). The filing says that Google will pay Fitbit a $250 million breakup fee if the deal doesn’t get anti-trust approval.

Google’s search engine and advertising arm is the subject of most of the anti-trust scrutiny; the company offers search results for over 90% of all searches worldwide, and it could create a problem for Fitbit users.

Data Concerns

Fitbit’s CEO, James Park, made sure to address Fitbit users’ concerns about data privacy in an email to the user base: “You will always be in control of your data, and we will remain transparent about the data we collect and why. We never sell your personal information, and Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads.”

Fitbit has a strong brand presence, so its acquisition into a Silicon Valley tech giant isn’t surprising. But Google’s prior knowledge of our search queries, our interests, our location, and much more were separated from our health wearables—until now.

In 2017, Alphabet’s AI lab, DeepMind, was found to be in violation of patient privacy laws because the company got access to medical records from the British National Health Service. Displaying negligence in following basic patient privacy rules is not exactly something anyone would want when it comes to their own medical data.

Later on, to fix the issue, DeepMind said it would transfer the unit that processed medical records to Google but would not link patient data with Google accounts. This was another huge red flag for privacy watchdogs and advocates around the world.

Lawmakers in the U.S. are not so sure about the acquisition either; Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island is the chairman of the House’s antitrust subcommittee. His subcommittee is already leading an investigation into Big Tech. Cicilline says that Google would get tons of valuable data, insights, and analysis from location and health data from Fitbit users. The deal, in short, is highly concerning, especially when considering Google’s recent track record with data and privacy history.

David says that this acquisition deal shows that Google isn’t scared of flexing its power despite the anti-trust inquiries and fines.

“This proposed transaction is a major test of antitrust enforcers’ will and ability to enforce the law and halt anti-competitive concentrations of economic power,” which deserves an immediate and scrutinizing investigation, he urged in a written statement.

The Wearables War

Born from a mixture of fitness-tracking and Internet of Things development, the wearables industry is expanding rapidly. And for big tech giants who have massive amounts of money and resources, entering this field is an opportunity that’s too good to pass up.

When Apple announced its Watch in 2015, many experts questioned if Fitbit could hold its own against the tech titan’s weight. But Fitbit stayed strong and kept adding more features to their smartwatches. Apple and Fitbit are in constant flux over a new feature; when one has a new feature, the other company will work hard to introduce a similar feature as soon as possible.

But despite Fitbit’s lofty efforts, Apple still takes the lion’s share of the market: it had a 38% share in the second quarter, according to Canalys, a tech analysis firm. Fitbit, in comparison, had a 24.1% market share.

In 2018, Fitbit posted its earnings sheet showing a 6% year-over-year drop in revenue to $1.5 billion. Upon releasing the Versa Lite, Fitbit showed even fewer profits later in the year.

For Fitbit, Google’s money and technical expertise can breathe new life and features into the wearable devices. On the flip side, having Fitbit in their fold will enable Google to easily enter both the fitness-tracking and medical wearables development market. The deal will close in 2020, pending any anti-trust issues, and Google will pay $7.35 per share, for a total of $2.1 billion.

Google has tried to wedge its way into the hardware market with its smartphone Pixel series since 2016, but the phone line hasn’t gained much traction among users. After its acquisition of Nest in 2014, Google also sells smart thermostats, smoke detectors, and security cameras. But adding wearables, a market that Google has notoriously stayed away from, will expand the company’s potential to catch up to Apple in hardware. Financial analysts and experts agree that Google is Apple’s closest competitor.

The Next 10,000 Steps

Michael Pachter is an analyst at Wedbush Securities. He says that Google “buying Fitbit makes more sense than trying to build yet another competitor to Fitbit.” But, he said, Google has had trouble with making great products for consumers. Couple that with the fact that Google often shuts down its many ventures and forays into other fields, like Google+, Hangouts, and Allo, and you can see that Google obviously has more than a few internal problems that need fixing.

Do you have an Apple Watch or Fitbit? What do you think about Google’s acquisition of Fitbit? Will this lead to yet another battle in the long war between tech titans for market share? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!