Doctors’ Roles With Wearables

There has not been a shortage of recent news about the benefits of wearables in the healthcare space. GE recently took to their Ideas Lab forum to post on how wearables will be changing the roles that doctors play in consumers’ health.

While there are risks of consumers creating false or misleading assumptions from the data created through wearables, generally the view is that fitness trackers encourage individuals to lead healthier lives. Larger initiatives by major players such as Google’s Android Wear, or Apple’s long rumored Healthbook, will only create more inroads to managing health through wearable devices. These initiatives are contributing factors to the projected growth of the medical wearable device market from $2 billion in 2012 to $5.8 billion in 2019.

Doctors test out Google Glass in emergency room settings.

Dr. Peter Weiss believes that the rise in consumer wearable medical devices will lead to a new movement, what he is calling “intelligent data.” According to Weiss, the data created by wearable devices is useless unless properly interpreted. For this to happen, private, opt-in sharing of the data with doctors will create prescriptive insights that users can implement. The ongoing collection of this data will help create comprehensive profiles for patients’ medical records that will be superior to the current snapshots that exist.

Through acting as the learned interpreters of the data collected from wearables, doctors will take on a new role to helping to guide patients remotely. Doctors’ insights and interpretations will lead to new technological breakthroughs.

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