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.

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.

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.

Wearables encompass so much more than smartwatches, and a team of researchers at Chicago-based Northwestern University are on a mission to track more than your average smartwatch with a smart skin patch.

Not Your Average Band-Aid

Dr. John Rogers and his team are intimately familiar with smart sensors; between sweat monitors and brain monitors to whole-body sensor patches and fingernail electronics to track blood oxygen, they have worked on many different types of wearables for healthy, at-risk, and post-incident patients. For Dr. Roger’s lab, medical development for wearables prioritizes low- or no-power electronics that are soft enough to place on human skin and mold to the body’s shape.

The team’s newest wearable (and arguably the most holistic), however, claims to monitor almost every vibration that your body generates throughout the day and night. The patch is non-intrusive; it is about the size of a regular Band-Aid, and it tracks your heart rhythms, vocal vibrations, movements, body orientation, swallowing, breathing, sleep, and more.

In the Nature Biomedical Engineering publication of their research, the authors wrote about how easily the wearable could be manufactured commercially, “offering a high level of technology readiness.” Additionally, the wearable can quickly become more advanced with extra accelerometers of varying sensitivities, a way to measure blood oxygen levels, and monitoring blood sugar.

In short, eventually, consumers will want a device that silently and unobtrusively measures things in our bodies that we don’t usually even think about. Autonomous activities, like breathing rate, digestion effectiveness, and even your eyes’ pupillary response times are valuable data points that can help identify risk for stroke or cardiac arrest.

Ultimately, the goal for all wearables is to aid in personalized and preventative medicine and care using a variety of biomarkers and data points in real-time. The more data we can generate for our providers and AI algorithms to analyze, the better for us as patients.

Engineered for Personal Use

The wearable uses several tiny, low-power, and high-bandwidth accelerometers that track big bodily movements in addition to small, minute internal movements within your body. The patch comes with a battery, charging controllers and microcontrollers that oversee storage and communications using flash memory and Bluetooth.

Regulator components maintain the signal using resistors, amplifiers, and capacitors. An accompanying smartphone app maintains a transparent user experience, and the ability for the device to charge inductively so the user doesn’t have to plug anything in.

All of these components are linked with stretchable copper wires and embedded like a sandwich between two layers of flexible silicone gel that stretch and move naturally with the body. When they all work together, they measure bodily vibrations and sound frequencies from 0 to 1,600 Hertz.

This device is definitely not a smartwatch, however; the authors say that the ideal location for the patch is at the hollow of your throat. That’s not very fashionable, but this location can get accurate vibrations from your lungs, heart, and digestive system.

Putting This New Wearable to the Test

In lab tests, the patch was able to generate many data points about the body. It used mechanical signals from the throat to capture data about snoring, signing, breathing, coughing, talking, and swallowing. It marked when speech started and when it ended, but it’s unknown if the patch recognized the words that were actually spoken.

In the real world, the patch was tested in spin class; it accurately measured breathing cycles and heart rate. During a dinner test, the wearable marked when the user swallowed or spoke. During sleep, the device watched small bodily movements to calculate sleep positions, track heart rate, and monitor sleep stages and sleep cycles.

For many consumers, sleep is an important metric for a wearable, but this level of detail can be life-saving for infants and older patients.

Some Hurdles Before Market

These smart patches are almost to the stage of being sold to consumers, but there are a few hurdles to get over before we see people rushing to buy these.

Firstly, placing this patch on your throat isn’t attractive or fashionable. While this may seem like a shallow complaint, it’s an absolutely realistic one for most consumers.

Secondly, and most importantly, we don’t know how this device or its app handles data privacy. Google’s recent acquisition of Fitbit means there’s a spot open for a new competitor: one that prioritizes user privacy and data safety.

For this reason, the team needs to set strong privacy controls and policies before this patch is released for sale to the general public. We cannot have a repeat of Google’s Project Nightingale, which took medical patient data from Ascension clinics across 21 states without asking patients for their consent.

Although this patch can save lives, prevent an impending medical event, and monitor health improvements over time, we must not hastily introduce this extremely valuable device to the public without diligently securing its data ecosystem.

What do you think of this new wearable device? Would you use it? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

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.

Contact us today for a Free Consultation!

In England, patients leaving a group of hospitals in the southeast are receiving their own wireless, connected armbands. These wearables watch vital signs like oxygen levels, pulse, respiratory rate, body temperature, and blood pressure. This new discharge protocol is being carried out under a new National Health Service pilot program.

The new program uses AI to analyze the patient’s data in real-time speed, and it’s already shown to decrease hospital readmission rates and emergency room visits. Home visits, which can be expensive, have reduced by 22%, and patients are following their treatment plans more closely at home.

To AI or Not to AI?

Harvard Business School professor and Innosight co-founder Clay Christensen says this AI MedTech program is targeting “non-consumption”. This is a business opportunity where consumers are required to take action but they don’t currently have the tools or technology to do so.

For example, prior to the armbands, hospital employees had to drive up to 1.5 hours round-trip to check on patients in-person once per week. With AI algorithms keeping an eye on worrisome data trends, however, patients and hospital employees get notified well in advance of any major health complication.

Many experts believe that AI will introduce very low-error predictions at a much cheaper cost than using humans. These successful case studies always lead to more AI implementations in healthcare, but sometimes AI isn’t appropriate for every sector of healthcare. And because AI MedTech applications can be expensive to design and develop, healthcare systems that focus on the bottom line aren’t well-suited for this type of technology.

AI in medical imaging tools is very expensive; hospitals are forecasted to spend over $2 billion per year by 2023. Currently, hospitals employ specialists who are trained to find diseases ranging from cancer to cataracts. But because this profession requires holistic knowledge of the body and medicine, AI isn’t the greatest asset for these specialists. Its ability to be useful to patients is low, and associated costs won’t decrease for this AI application either.

Decentralized Care

For clinics that want to decentralize care, AI is a perfect tool, however. For example, patients are faced with a multitude of choices throughout the day that directly affect their health: the choice to exercise, eat moderately and varied, meditate, and more. Usually, there isn’t a doctor around telling us what’s best for our health; we must make the choice for ourselves. But these choices add up over time to increase the cost of healthcare for everyone.

The World Health Organization estimates that 60% of related factors to health and quality of life correlate directly to lifestyle choices, like taking prescriptions, reducing stress, and exercising. With AI, sending the patient a reminder to exercise or eat a veggie meal doesn’t take any extra time or effort from the doctor. And if something looks off, the AI can decide whether to send a reminder to meditate or set up a doctor’s appointment.

Several universities and health insurance companies are working to increase patient monitoring from home. These programs have produced positive results, but it’ll take some time before the AI fully meets researchers’ expectations.

Experts look to a future where the U.K.’s NHS program gets implemented in locally first before open sourcing it for global use. Already, the connected devices were approved by the FDA for use in New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital. In the U.S., patient readmissions cost hospitals more than $40 billion every year.

These programs have yielded three lessons on how to use AI to address non-consumption in patient-centric healthcare.

(1) Target an impact on critical metrics, like readmission rates and insurance payouts.

And then begin to tackle the metric with realistic goals instead of lofty ideas. AI can be iteratively optimized for continuous improvement if it can see an evolving trend in the data. Grady Hospital in Atlanta has saved $4 million through a reduction in readmission rates by using AI to find at-risk patients.

(2) Increase collaboration to reduce risks.

Finding others who are working to crack the same problem as you can mean the difference between three years or a decade in launch time. Ascension, Aetna, Optum, Humana, and other insurance companies are collaborating in using blockchain to increase their data pool with customer data. By reducing time to consolidate out-of-network claims, these insurance companies are also improving patient access to care providers.

Sometimes, doing the job without help can pose major risks. For example, the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston had a multi-million dollar AI project fail because it was incompatible with its own electronic health records system.

(3) Partner with highly-specialized professionals instead of competing against them.

Several modern-day AI applications compete with doctors; for example, radiology-focused AI algorithms often perform as well as or better than human radiologists in image-based diagnosing. But we shouldn’t let AI usurp the specialist because AI needs human eyes to check over its recommended decisions.

A Healthier Future

AI in MedTech and healthcare is changing and improving lives all around the world. And while AI isn’t the right tool for every medical application, it can yield profound results in situations where it’s needed. Better health and healthcare is undoubtedly a win-win for every stakeholder involved.

What AI applications are you most excited to see in healthcare in the near future? Let us know in the comments!

This year, we’re entering the era of 5G. We’re about to witness a profound paradigm shift that will affect nearly every technology under the sun. But perhaps no other field will benefit more than healthcare.

Due to a stringent regulatory environment and strongly embedded legacy systems, healthcare is known to be a straggler when it comes to adopting and implementing new technologies. But over the past few years, the positive results of innovation on the medical sector have been undeniable.

And 5G will only continue this trend by opening up opportunities for significant improvement in both patient care and operational efficiencies. Let’s take a look at the future of healthcare with 5G.

Making Preventive Care More Personalized

Healthcare isn’t restricted to only finding better treatment solutions; preventative practices that preclude treatment are also a top priority for all medical stakeholders. With 5G, personalized, self-directed care will become more viable than ever before. Patients will be empowered to manage their health in unprecedented ways.

We’re already able to achieve this in some capacity by combining MedTech development and wearable technology. But this really only scratches the surface of what’s possible due to 4G’s limitations. In order to support continuous monitoring, wearables need access to uniform, uninterrupted connectivity. And 5G can fulfill this need for consistent high speed.

Revolutionizing Data Speed and Management

The state of data management is also in dire need of a dose of innovation. Transmitting mountains of data makes existing networks slow to a crawl.

But it’s absolutely necessary for providers to be able to interface with patients every day. On top of this, network congestion also stifles the capabilities of the Internet of Things (IoT), a technology that revolves around pushing, pulling, and acting on data.

Luckily, 5G happens to be just what the doctor ordered. By providing a more efficient pathway for gargantuan amounts of data to be shared faster across networks, 5G can support both the demands of patient-provider interfacing and IoT development.

In a recent test, Qualcomm claims to have reached download speeds of 4.5 gigabits per second with 5G connectivity. But at first, you should temper your expectations a bit as it gets up and running; Qualcomm also said that initial median rates of 1.5 gigabits per second are more likely as 5G gets established.

Still, that’s no slowpoke when it comes to data transmittal — it’s basically 20 times faster than what 4G can offer. To put this in perspective, it usually takes six minutes to download a typical movie on 4G connectivity. With 5G, that time is reduced to 17 seconds.

But while 5G is vastly superior to 4G when it comes to speed, that’s only one of its advantages. 5G will also trim down latency to only a couple of milliseconds and should be much more reliable in data transmittal. This will open up the possibility for new, more advanced IoT applications that require rapid responsiveness to function, like remote equipment control.

Tapping into Telehealth’s True Potential

1 in 5 Americans live in rural areas. That’s 60 million people. From higher occurrences of chronic conditions, a greater chance of being uninsured or underinsured, and increased possibility of poverty, rural communities in America deal with a plethora of problems.

Around the world, the story is much the same, or worse. These challenges are one of the main catalysts behind the telemedicine market’s anticipated growth at a compound annual rate of 17% through 2023.

Soon, 5G will enable doctors to tap into more powerful remote monitoring tools that will allow them to keep in touch with patients whether they’re in Tokyo or New York City. 5G will also open up access to specialists for people who might otherwise not able to get the treatment they need.

With seamless support of high-resolution video requirements, 5G will also make telehealth appointments and consultations more effective. Medical professionals will be able to rapidly transmit massive files from equipment like MRIs and X-ray machines to other doctors so they can make more informed decisions about patient treatment plans.

But these capabilities become more astounding when you throw other emerging technologies into the mix. We already have AI that’s capable of fully diagnosing patients and recommending proper treatment plans. AI is even able to predict possible complications with outpatients so preventative measures can be put in place beforehand.

But like IoT, AI is being held back by data bottlenecks. To operate, AI often needs massive amounts of data from disparate sources to learn and improve. 4G cannot reliably support this flow of data. But 5G can.

Some Inevitable Obstacles

As with any other new technology, 5G’s integration into society won’t be seamless. While it can drastically improve the way healthcare is provided across the world, stakeholders must be strategic about how they use this technology, especially when it’s first rolled out.

In an interview with HealthTech Insider, Dr. Joseph Kvedar, Vice President of Connected Health at Partners HealthCare, explains the implications of tech failing in healthcare: “If you put in an Amazon order and it doesn’t happen, the world doesn’t stop. But if it’s your pacemaker, that’s a different matter.”

Besides concerns over care quality, cost could also be an issue. When 5G rolls out on a wide scale, old devices and parts of our network infrastructure could be rendered obsolete. Replacing these will be expensive for providers. And unfortunately, these will need to be carried out swiftly to keep pace.

In spite of these obstacles, there’s no doubt that 5G will bring numerous improvements and benefits to healthcare. All it’s going to take is some forethought and creativity to implement it correctly.

What other benefits do you think 5G will bring to healthcare? Which ones are you most excited about? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

When the iPhone reached the consumer market, it completely changed everything. Devices made by major industry players like Blackberry and Nokia were practically rendered obsolete overnight. Apple showed us what mobile phones were really capable of doing. And once we saw it, we could never look back.

Another technological sector has reached this junction point: Wearables. While fitness trackers like Fitbit are undeniably impressive, it’s crystal-clear that wearables have greater potential than anything being done right now.

Where will the inspiration and innovation come from that transforms wearables from nice-to-have devices into everyday necessities? Healthcare.

The First Step to Making Wearables a Must-Have

Before he became the Founder and CEO of Australian wearable company dorsaVi, Andrew Ronchi was a physiotherapist. Working in this capacity made him realize there was a crucial gap between wearables and health professionals.

“What we do as health professionals could be improved with more accurate and objective data to guide the advice we provide. I looked for solutions, but I couldn’t find one,” he says. “There really seemed to be a gap in the market for a wearable that could provide this accurate movement data to better guide and inform treatment of patients and eliminate the guesswork.”

We’ve already taken the first step in this direction with wearables that can count the number of steps you take or measure your heart rate. But these capabilities haven’t made wearable devices a necessity in the eyes of consumers.

To do this, healthcare development must take a different direction; it must pivot towards preventive medicine.

More Informed Decisions = More Accurate Solutions

Instead of just providing status updates, wearables could track patterns and make predictions about what comes next. This would make them a standard in preventive medicine. Think of it this way: the more informed a healthcare provider is, the quicker and more accurately they can find solutions to your problem.

Making this accessible to the masses would create a new way for us to approach healthcare. dorsaVi’s work revolves around unlocking lab-quality data and insights at an affordable rate.

“The data produced by dorsaVi was previously only available in a biomechanics lab, which was out of consideration for the vast majority of people,” explains Ronchi. “It was pretty much the exclusive domain of elite athletes and researchers.”

Opening up this avenue produces plenty of use cases. We’d easily know what food we should and shouldn’t eat any given day to adhere to a diet. We’d know when to precisely start and stop an exercise. Beyond accessibility to vital information and insights, it would also give us certainty about situations. We’d be able to identify when we should worry (or not even care) about something that’s going on with our bodies.

Bringing Data to the Masses Is the Healthiest Thing We Can Do

Aside from giving the average consumer new abilities, wearables would also make medical check-ups and appointments more efficient. Since they can seamlessly monitor and track real health metrics, wearables could reduce the number of lab tests and procedures we need to do at the doctor’s to find out exactly what is going on. This means less time testing theories and a faster diagnosis cycle.

Today, many medical facilities and workers find themselves overwhelmed and burned out. As a result, we run into scenarios where sick people have to wait an inordinate amount of time to see a specialist. This is unacceptable. By expediting numerous processes, wearables can drastically reduce this wait time so we get answers and an action plan faster.

On a grand scale, this will impact healthcare systems around the world in profound ways. Imagine having a “Check Engine” light for your body. It would empower each of us to take our health into our own hands more.

With data and artificial intelligence, wearables can hone in on specific problems and remove the guesswork from the equation. And in healthcare, getting to the root of a problem efficiently and effectively is everything.

It’s Already Happening Before Our Eyes

But enough about the future—the best thing about the potential of wearables is that it’s already being realized right now. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, developers showcased their best efforts at adapting wearables to focus on healthcare.

Under Armour is partnering with an array of companies (Samsung, HOVR, JBL) to transform the running experience with its MapMyRun app. The collaboration lets runners see important details about their posture and weight distribution so they can not only improve their performance but prevent long-term health issues that come with incorrect running.

Welt used CES to debut its smart belt for business professionals. The belt is capable of tracking overeating, activity, and waist size; it can even nudge people out of their chairs if they’ve been sitting for too long or alert them that too many calories have been consumed.

The CES showroom floor was filled with examples like the above ones. And more than anything else, it’s a sign of the times—it’s inevitable that wearables will revolutionize healthcare.

Making the power of relevant health data accessible to all will transform the way we view our health much in the same way that Apple transformed the mobile phone market. And as in that example, once we see what’s possible, we’ll never be able to look back.