Nowadays, there are more and more threats to people’s health in life. With the continuous improvement of people’s awareness of health protection, various medical and health devices are also coming into the public’s view. Among them, the demand for wearable medical devices is also expanding.
According to sohu.com, data shows that the size of China’s wearable device market was 18.55 billion yuan in 2016 and has grown to 26.42 billion yuan in 2017. From the data, we can see that the field of wearable medical devices is starting a fire.
Recently, Cyrcadia Asia, a wearable breast cancer detection device company, developed a smart wearable bra insert that provides accurate early breast cancer detection; Medical device maker Omron developed the HeartGuide smartwatch that monitors blood pressure and heart rate in real time; Apple has a new API for the Apple Watch that tracks symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, among other things.
Now, there are a lot of these products on the market, so what’s driving the growth of the wearable medical device industry?
What’s behind the popularity of wearable medical devices?
In a short period of time, the market size of wearable medical devices has increased a lot. Then what are the factors contributing to the popularity of wearable medical devices?
First, it can be monitored in real time. Wearable medical devices can reflect the physiological data of the human body to people’s mobile devices through sensors, providing data for users, so that users can monitor their physical health status in real time.
This year, ASUS released its first smart band, the ASUS VivoWatch BP, which features blood pressure monitoring and AI health management, making it one of the few wearable medical devices on the market that can be used to measure blood pressure. The ASUS VivoWatch BP can record blood pressure readings along with other health data, including heart rate, sleep quality, stress and activity. The ASUS VivoWatch BP also automatically identifies the user’s movement status, giving the user more accurate data.
If users want to know their blood pressure, they can know it by looking at the bracelet, rather than using a traditional blood pressure meter, which is faster and more convenient. If you see your blood pressure rise, you can immediately take measures to reduce blood pressure, reduce the occurrence of high blood pressure and stroke, cerebral hemorrhage and other symptoms.
Today, most wearable medical devices offer real-time monitoring. For example, The Raiing intelligent electronic thermometer for children developed by Beijing Ruiren Technology Medical Co., Ltd. has functions such as high and low temperature alarm and medication reminder, and can realize remote terminal monitoring. The smart bracelet mambo HR, developed by Lexin Medical, can accurately measure the heart rate and record the user’s health data. Data from these products are fed back to users in real time so they can take quick action.
Second, it reduces health care costs. Due to the timeliness of wearable medical devices, it can not only release traditional medical resources, but also develop new medical means.
The elderly with age, for example, will often appear some problems, then it is going to the hospital after a cumbersome registration consultation process, if use wearable medical devices, it can save time and cost, and if there is a problem, can also direct feedback to the doctor, the doctor on-site or remote consultation in time according to the feedback, Greatly reduce the cost of treatment for both doctors and patients.
According to Beijing Daily, 90 percent of the elderly in Dongli, Xili and Shilibao communities under the jurisdiction of Balizhuang Sub-district, Chaoyang District, will be provided with a smart wearable medical device, whose real-time monitoring data will be synchronized to the information platform of the second health service center in Balizhuang via the Internet. When the elderly’s health indicators are abnormal, medical staff will rush to the scene and carry out medical intervention.
For such minor abnormalities, wearable medical devices can help doctors administer timely treatment. At the same time, patients can also correct pathological changes in time by changing the index, avoid emergency treatment and hospitalization, reduce the number of medical visits, and relieve the tension of the bed.
Third, provide medical big data. Wearable medical devices can collect users’ health data, which can be provided not only to medical organizations to serve patients, but also to different industries and drive their development.
It is understood that companies like Emdeon gather medical data from wearable medical devices through the Internet every year, and then compare and analyze more meaningful data to provide more valuable information to medical organizations. For doctors, this is already a great convenience, and the diagnosis of patients will be more scientific.
In addition to bringing convenience to medical staff, the medical big data provided by wearable medical devices has also injected fresh blood into other industries. For example, WellDoc, a wearable medical device company focused on diabetes management, provides data to insurance companies, and insurance companies are willing to protect users. As a provider of remote cardiac monitoring services, CardioNet can provide monitoring data to scientific research institutions for research and development.
Big data technology is being used more and more in people’s real life. Wearable medical devices collect people’s body information and then integrate these data to provide people with more intuitive and effective services.
To sum up, wearable medical devices can provide users with reasonable guidance to a certain extent, and at the same time, they can also bring data support to medical organizations and different industries. However, the development of wearable medical device industry is still in the preliminary stage, so it can be said that advantages and challenges coexist, and its products need to be improved.
Accuracy and safety need to be improved, and wearable medical devices are still on the way
Nowadays, there are a lot of wearable medical devices on the market, which can be said to have become the “sweet property” of many enterprises. But as the saying goes, “the ideal is beautiful, the reality is very skinny”. Is the market of wearable medical devices really bright?
From the perspective of wearable medical devices on the market, most of them are lacking in accuracy, professionalism and meeting people’s needs, which need to be further improved.
First, the detection data is not accurate enough, and the experience is poor. Wearable medical devices provide technical support for the detection of human health big data, but it is difficult to identify the accuracy of data.
According to Tencent Digital, the measurement of heart rate is basically accurate under the current technological conditions, but there is no way to accurately measure blood pressure and other aspects, and the accuracy is far from reaching medical standards. For example, a 37 degree wristband can be used to measure heart rate and blood pressure, but when the blood pressure is measured at 140, there is no notification. This shows that the data it detects is inconsistent with the monitoring program, leading to no response from the bracelet. Naturally, users cannot take timely measures, so the experience is poor.
Second, personal information security. Wearable medical devices are the devices closest to the human body for real-time monitoring of health data, which can not only collect the basic information of users, but also collect real-time objective life information and subjective input event information. These personal privacy information is vulnerable to hacker attacks, once the user’s privacy is attacked, it may threaten the user’s life and health.
A network engineer at a Chinese Internet security vulnerability platform called Wuyun once told the 21st Century Business Herald that there is no technical standard for cybersecurity for wearable medical devices. In addition, some domestic manufacturers of wearable medical devices have ultra viential vulnerabilities, which enable attackers to steal users’ cloud information through interfaces.
Due to the natural properties of wearable medical devices, they have a strong degree of binding with users’ personal information, and hackers are easy to be driven by interests or competitors to invade, so users’ privacy will face great challenges.
Third, doctors’ participation in r&d is low. Recently, Liu Chengyu, director of the joint laboratory and professor at the School of Instrument Science and Engineering of Southeast University, called for more scientific research institutions and enterprises to truly invest in the medical research and development of wearable devices. He said that at present, many companies and institutes in the domestic wearable medical device industry do not have a strong scientific research team reserve, so there is less technical investment in the medical field.
Due to the low degree of doctors’ participation in the research and development, blood glucose meter and blood pressure meter are not reliable in a sense, because these devices lack accurate medicine. Therefore, this is undoubtedly one of the challenges that wearable medical devices are facing.
From this point of view, wearable medical devices still have a long way to go.
To promote the healthy development of wearable medical devices
Because there are still many challenges in the development of wearable medical devices, most wearable medical and health devices can only provide data monitoring functions at present, but cannot do some very professional data collection work. However, in the future, wearable medical devices will provide users with integrated services of diagnosis, detection and intervention, thus providing users with the most convenient and practical mobile medical and health benefits. Specifically, the improvement of wearable medical devices can come from three aspects.
First, collect and aggregate disease data to make the data monitored more scientific. The main feature of medical-grade wearable devices is targeted at certain diseases. Since these patients have their own pathological characteristics, such devices focus on the detection of symptoms of certain diseases, collect data, and then combine it with the graded diagnosis and treatment encouraged by the state, and carry out effective cooperation with medical organizations.
Not only the detection of medical-grade wearable devices needs to be strengthened, but the wearable medical devices also need to master the main entrances of patient population and data monitoring, and then strengthen the recording, summary, sorting and analysis of disease evidence to make the monitored data more effective, medical and scientific.
Digital diabetes care company Glooko’s insulin management system uses a website or mobile app to collect data on a user’s blood sugar, and then records, tracks and analyzes the data, artery.com reported. Currently, Glooko supports 26 glucose meters and covers 85% of the U.S. brands, and patients can use eight mobile devices to collect data, which makes it easy to integrate scattered data from different devices. The data given after controlled experiments are more reliable.
Then, the realization of data sharing, thus promoting the development of mobile health. With the progress of science and technology and the development of mobile medical platform, future medical-grade wearable devices will surely promote the construction of cloud. Data will be uploaded to the cloud to realize interoperability and sharing, so that doctors can propose diagnosis and treatment suggestions and prescribe prescriptions after remote consultation. If wearable medical devices can seamlessly connect patients, doctors and the cloud, it could quickly boost the development of remote mobile health.
Recently, the Internet platform of “intelligent manufacturing + cloud” created by China System Intelligent has realized the interconnection between equipment and equipment, equipment and enterprises, enterprises and enterprises, enterprises and customers. In the future, if such a platform can be applied to the medical field, it will facilitate the sharing of medical data, thus promoting the development of wearable medical devices.
Finally, medical support is provided to make it of medical value. At present, it is precisely because of the lack of effective medical professional resources that wearable medical devices lack of real medical functions. In order for wearable medical devices to be medical, it needs the support of a strong team of medical experts and the implantation of more medical principles and technical services, so as to enhance the value of their medical applications.
Nowadays, the development of wearable medical devices is changing with each passing day. What we are looking forward to is whether wearable medical devices can break through the clouds hindering their development and reach the clouds.
Article/Liu Kuang public account, ID: Liukuang110