Guarding Health with Innovative Wearable Devices, Part 1 of 2

Wearable healthcare technology refers to the devices on a wearer’s wrists, head, feet or clothing, which can collect their health metrics and save them in a personalized database to help set their well-being goals or send to healthcare professionals with permission for remote monitoring and analysis.

Wearable technology benefits all healthcare community members: For individuals, it’s affordable, personal, and can provide continuous, 24/7 and stable fitness tracking. In addition to tracking our daily activities, fitness trackers can also record data during sleep, including hours of uninterrupted sleep and the duration of sleep. Moreover, wearable healthcare technology can provide instant feedback on one’s health improvements as a result of exercise and healthy lifestyle changes, which helps users a great deal to become engaged and stick to good new habits.

Let’s have a look at some of the latest wearable healthcare technologies by category:

Wrist-worn devices: For well-being monitoring, there are several advantages to developing a technical device for the wrist: It’s more convenient to view information and easier to carry than a mobile phone during activities such as biking, hiking and swimming. Wrist-worn devices like fitness trackers and smartwatches are already reckoned as mainstream for general biometrics monitoring and activity tracking. Advanced wearable devices can play a role in chronic health condition management as well.

Smart Shoes: Although still in the early stages of development, there are already quite a few smart shoes integrated with high-tech features to enhance comfort and health. The Digitsole Smart Insoles are intelligent footwear inserts that analyze the wearer’s walking and running posture to enhance daily life and fitness. While there are numerous fall alert devices available, B-Shoe is a much-needed type of smart footwear aiming at preventing falls before they occur. Lechal (“take me there” in Hindi) haptic smart footwear developed by Ducere Technologies in India is a groundbreaking solution to guide the way for the unsighted.