The wearable revolution is here. Portable and wearable technology, such as smartphones and smartwatches, is changing everything we thought we knew about technology.
Including, it seems, the distinction between equipment designed for practitioners and devices used by consumers. From ultrasound scanners to glucose meters, there’s not a lot that your consumer technology can’t emulate. Here, Neil Oliver, technical marketing manager at Ltd, explores the trend and looks at the potential consequences.
Your average smartphone now has more processing power than the supercomputers used by NASA circa 1969. It’s no surprise then that there has been a growing surge in recent years of start-ups specifically developing peripheral devices to monitor intimate details of one’s physical condition.
The rise of wearable devices can be attributed to a much larger societal disposition towards the Internet of Things (IoT). Although the IoT, as a concept, has been around for many years, it’s only recently started to pick up traction.
A maturing ecosystem of mobile operating systems such as Android and iOS, as well as of cheap in the low profitability of the medical technology sector, and they want a piece of the pie.
Wearables make patient data readily accessible and may reduce the number of times we need to visit a doctor, thereby alleviating the burden on our healthcare system. As well as this, it is becoming cheaper to function, traditionally limited to large and expensive medical devices in hospitals.
