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.

In 1965, a Japanese medical development company built a device called “Manpo-kei”, which translates to “10,000 steps meter” in English. Many people see the 10,000-steps-a-day goal as too ambitious or too simplistic. The argument is that steps don’t encompass everything (i.e. how many calories you burned while scrubbing your shower) and that fitness trackers often miscount steps.

Skeptics of the 10k Goal

When Fitbit launched in San Francisco in 2009, the company used this metric as the default daily step count goal for all users who bought a fitness tracking device. The two co-founders, James Park and Eric Friedman, were inspired by the Nintendo Wii to create wearable technology that used sensors to gamify health and fitness. They wanted to make being healthy both achievable (through daily habits) and fun (with real-time stats, goal measurement, and phone notifications).

Although Park believes that the 10k step goal is valuable for people around the world to motivate themselves to move more, he says steps aren’t the only benchmark in improving your health and fitness. For that reason, Fitbit and the other wearable companies are continuously working on expanding and evolving their measurement metrics and areas of tracking. Although steps allow us to get a glimpse into our activity for the day, we also now have stairs tracking, activity tracking, and much more. The goal is to help people see how these areas all fit together to form a holistic picture of your health.

In other words, it humbles us to understand that everyone has at least one thing they could improve upon. Another major addition to the fitness tracking world is analysis: your wearable’s app can tell you what your statistics mean, how you can improve them, and things to watch out for. For example, devices with sleep tracking emphasize that constant lack of sleep can take a toll on your productivity, mood, and ability to reason.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has an exercise and activity recommendation of a minimum of 150 minutes of weekly moderate exercise. That adds up to about 30 minutes of exercise per day, which satisfies the 10,000 step goal. For most people, 10,000 is a good place to start, but fitness trackers do let you adjust your personal goal to be more attainable. It’s okay to lower your goal if it makes it more likely to be achieved, rather than feeling like a failure day after day of missing the 10,000 step goal.

Tracking More Than Just Steps

Research shows that increasing your daily activity can improve your health in a variety of ways: better sleep, disease prevention, and improved cognitive function. Getting started is the most difficult part for most people, so buying an affordable fitness tracker can get things moving in the right direction quickly. Fitbit, in particular, focuses on making fitness more social and engaging, with challenges you can participate in with family and friends and fun animated badges for reaching milestones.

Park says he remembers sitting in an airport early on and overhearing people asking each other whether they were close to hitting their step goal for the day. The time was almost midnight, and the group got up to reach their 10,000 step goal by swiftly walking around the area. For Park, the most fulfilling aspects were that the users were motivated by the goal and that they were accomplishing the goal by moving together. That’s when Park knew that he and Friedman had created a global phenomenon.

Today, 10,000 steps remains the first goal we see when we get a new fitness tracker, but it’s not the only (or the most important) metric being tracked and analyzed. Fitbit added sleep tracking to their devices because resting rounds out a healthy lifestyle. There’s no way your body can recover from a daily 10,000+ step count without enough sleep. Additionally, lack of sleep can impact cognitive function and increase the risk of developing chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease. It’s extremely important that people get eight or more hours of sleep every night.

To develop the sleep tracking feature, Fitbit had to spend a lot of time researching and testing. Back then, the only way you could track sleep and understand it was to pay a visit to an expensive sleep lab. Using heart rate sensors within their IoT application, the company was able to pinpoint the exact times you fall asleep and wake up. Fitbit now offers “sleep insights”, where it nudges you to maintain a consistent sleep schedule and consistent amount of sleep.

Unlocking New Achievements

Using advanced algorithms and sophisticated sensors, fitness trackers now keep an eye on many health metrics. One new feature is “Active Zone Minutes”, which tells you whether or not you’re meeting goals for vigorous exercise, like cardio, cleaning, or even playing with a toddler for a half-hour. But for Park, one of the biggest breakthroughs was adding heart-rate tracking to the Fitbit devices. Heart rate is a major indicator of health; for example, resting heart rate tells you how healthy your heart is (you’ll see it decrease after you spend a few weeks consistently doing cardio workouts). The heart also transports unoxygenated blood to the lungs, so reduced heart function directly affects breathing, oxygen saturation in the brain, and more.

Since the addition of heart-rate tracking, Park and Friedman have heard many stories from Fitbit users around the globe about how their device saved their life. The company is now conducting a study to see if Fitbit devices can find irregular heart rate (atrial fibrillation) in users. The newest generation of the Apple Watch has included an EKG (electrocardiogram) that alerts the user when their heart rate is irregular and abnormal. The Apple Watch then asks you to relax and take a seat to stabilize your heart rate and stress level.

Eventually, Park wants Fitbit devices to become more like “check engine” lights for the user’s health. He says that the global pandemic is significantly impacting how we work and live, and that stress has a lot to do with physical and mental health. When we can manage our stress levels, we experience a lift in our mood and outlook on life. Mindfulness sessions offer psychological and physiological improvement, and Fitbit has developed a “Relax” feature for some of their devices. It tracks your heart rate and breathing while it coaches you to inhale and exhale slowly and consistently.

The Limitless Potential of Sensors

Steps were the first feature to come out of using sensors for fitness tracking. And steps will always be a part of the holistic picture of health. But we can do more to actively improve our lifestyles and bodies, and advancing sensor technology unlocks more and more potential for what’s possible.

As for Park, his average daily step count is 10,000 per day, but he won’t hold his users to that if they’re not comfortable with it. Do you use a fitness tracker? Do you enjoy it? What features do you use the most? Let us know in the comments below!

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.

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.

Contact us today for a Free Consultation!

Welcome to the second and final entry of our “IoT Everywhere” series! In the first part, we examined what the Internet of Things (IoT) really is, where it came from, and where it’s headed. In case you missed it, you can check it out here.

For this segment, we’ll explore a few examples of popular IoT devices and paradigms in place today. More specifically, we’ll look at how wearables, chatbots, and smart cities are affecting our lives already and what we can expect to see from them in the near future. We’ll also take a look at cybersecurity’s paramount role in keeping IoT safe.

Wearable Devices

Wearables have been one of the largest categories of IoT devices since their popularity spike in 2017. During this year, 115 million wearable devices were bought globally. As wearable technology becomes smarter, faster, and less intrusive, that number is expected to increase.

Most people think of FitBits and Apple Watches when they hear the word “wearables.” With the ability to count steps, calories, and monitor metrics like heart rate, these devices are undoubtedly responsible for wearables’ surge in popularity. But they’re far from the only wearable technology on the scene now.

Other wearable devices include blood-glucose monitors, biometric sensors in workout shirts and sports bras, and even alertness level sensors in baseball caps for truck and heavy machinery drivers.

Another cool wearable idea is Internet-connected contacts that can let the user take photos or record videos for uploading. Think this is too futuristic? Think again — Samsung, Sony, and Google already have pending patents for this concept.

Wearables will inevitably play an integral role in pivoting healthcare from a reactive to a preventative model. Currently, the space is wide open for innovation, and many entrepreneurs and startups are racing to claim a stake in helping us shape a healthier future. Do you have any medical wearables ideas? If so, consider trying to make them a reality!

Chatbots

AI assistants use IoT to grab whatever information you’re asking for at the moment. Currently, most people use these capabilities to streamline functions in the home such as changing the thermostat or turning lights on or off. But this same technology is coming to your office, too.

Take office printers, for example. When the printer toner is low, an AI assistant will alert the appropriate person right away and even set up an online order of ink to be delivered ASAP. If the printer itself starts acting abnormally, the AI assistant will notify IT personnel to attend to the situation.

This technology marks the move away from text-based chatbots to voice-enabled ones. Using natural language processing and machine learning, vocal-based chatbots are self-optimizing their performance to be even better.

Smart Cities

Smart cities are a big investment, requiring incredible amounts of time, money, and effort. To outfit a metropolis with sensors requires coordination, organization, and a lot of patience. And down the line, further IoT development, troubleshooting, and testing require even more resources to bring new smart city features into the fold. But most urban areas of today will eventually be transformed into smart cities in some capacity.

Smart cities aim to improve citizen’s lives and better manage resources. In smart city IoT systems, machine-to-machine (M2M) interactions are necessary; no humans are needed to interpret data or outputs. These types of integrations save cities money and allow for faster, less error-prone communication.

While M2M interactions sound innovative, they’ve been around in cities for decades. Traffic lights are powered by M2M technology. But there’s some room for improvement. For example, when it’s late at night and there’s not much traffic, IoT-enabled traffic lights should direct you to go when the coast is clear. Often, we spend 5 minutes at a traffic light with no passing traffic. Although cities have put optimizations into place for traffic flow, cities will feel more seamless when machines are working in tandem.Public Wi-Fi in the subway system or over bridges will no longer be a futuristic idea. Public transportation, package deliveries, and cargo importing and exporting will become automated. These features will reduce environmental hazards and increase public safety.

By 2030, water consumption will increase by 40% globally. By watching our city’s water supply closely and ensuring preventative maintenance is routinely performed, we can help cities control their water needs without decreasing public access.

Cybersecurity Considerations

As we connect additional devices and sensors to our IoT systems, cybersecurity becomes increasingly weakened. Although most of our devices today are secure, newer devices that circumvent regulation can easily slip into the mix. Sure, adding one or two unsecured devices into your IoT system may not seem like a big deal, but when you’ve added in 6 or 7, you’re looking at a big security risk.

A Proofpoint researcher found a botnet virus in many IoT devices, including smart TVs, computers, and baby monitors. The virus was able to steal data, send spam, and remotely access the devices without asking the owner if it was allowed.

While a baby monitor may sound like a small issue, imagine the consequences of a botnet attack on an entire city’s devices and sensors.

Cybersecurity experts aren’t letting the boom of IoT devices stop them, however; Juniper Research, a consulting firm based outside of London, estimates that IoT cybersecurity spend will reach $6 billion by 2023. That’s a massive 300% increase over 2018.

IoT security experts warn consumers and enterprises alike to take cautionary steps towards securing devices. This includes advice like:

1. Be wary of connecting to cloud services without reading about their data encryption and protection policies.
2. Create separate networks for your IoT devices to connect to. This will help outsiders from connecting to the same network
3. Change up your passwords and don’t repeat them across websites and devices. Telesign’s recent survey showed that 75% of all consumers use the same password across websites, and many users don’t change their passwords for five years.
4. Universal Plug and Play is a great feature that allows your device to connect to nearby devices seamlessly. But this feature shouldn’t be turned on unless it’s necessary for your experience. This feature opens up the opportunity for botnet attacks, so play it safe!

IoT Is Connecting Us to the Future

The future is bright for IoT development, and we’ll certainly see IoT impact our lives in more ways than one. Expect to see this technology in our commutes, offices, cars, homes, kitchens, and so much more. IoT is connecting technology to humanity in unprecedented ways. And we can’t wait to see how this future unfolds.

What IoT innovations are you looking forward to benefiting from? Let us know in the comments below!