Maxim Details How Wearables Can Become More Integral to Patient Care

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Nov 21, 2019, 08:00 ET

SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 21, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- What will the state of healthcare look like in the near future? With sophisticated technologies such as healthcare wearables—and the data they are collecting—healthcare is on a path to become even more data-driven and personalized than it is today. Ideally, patients and doctors will be equipped to more closely monitor and communicate any changes in chronic conditions and also be more proactive about preventive care.

The medical community, however, is still only taking baby steps towards personalized, decentralized healthcare. Before the treasure trove of patient information can be distilled into insights that can be applied to future data, a substantial amount of recorded data, associated with ground truths, is needed. Consider step-tracking wearables. To develop algorithms that accurately interpret a given data set as steps, researchers had to collect data from pedestrians on a variety of parameters: ages, weights, and stride lengths; different types of shoes worn; and their walking patterns on different surfaces and inclines and at different speeds. In addition, they had to gather other data not associated with any steps to make sure that the algorithms won't falsely interpret them as steps.

A "chain of trust" is essential in order to turn continuous monitoring into personal health insights. Building that chain of trust entails a number of measures:

Accurate and reliable data interpretation. The challenge lies in handling "borderline" data. Any interpreting strategy or algorithm faces data sets that it finds ambiguous. For an algorithm to be reliable, users must be able to quantitatively understand its detection limits and error characteristics.
The data and/or its interpretation must reliably reach the decision maker for it to become actionable.
The data must be correctly associated with historical records of the patient for it to have context.
The data must be proven to be authentic to trigger any meaningful action.

Ian Chen, an executive director in Maxim's Industrial & Healthcare Business Unit, explores what it will take for wearable healthcare devices to be deemed trustworthy enough to augment clinical data in order to inform healthcare decisions. Read his blog post, "How Wearables Can Become a More Integral Part of Healthcare," to learn more.

SOURCE Maxim Integrated Products, Inc.