Are you healthy enough?

Have you heard of Wello or AliveCor? These are a new breed of devices which attach to your smart phone and claim to detect atrial fibrillation, track your blood pressure, temperature and even more. You can also get other devices that can measure your sleep patterns, oxygen level in your blood, and your overall physical activity.

Our bodies generates an incredible amount of data and some people are now taking this to the extreme. Take Larry Smarr, the man who quantified himself. He measures every detail of his body. One has to wonder what he used to do with his free time.

This all sounds very exciting, but here’s the rub. Until now, you would go to see a doctor when you didn’t feel well; and the doctor would treat you. Now, thanks to these new devices, the device will tell you when to go see a doctor, or you will go whenever the device is reporting questionable result. The problem with this is that no doctor will have enough time to see all these new patients. Our health care system is not built to support this style of medicine.

So, where do we go from here? Well, we have to move from traditional medicine to predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory medicine. One example of technology moving in this direction (as mentioned in a previous issue), is the IBM Watson machine, which is capable of understanding a question and coming up with the most probable answer.

In conclusion, when we collect data from the myriad of devices around us, we shouldn’t be mesmerized, by how much data we can collect. Rather, we should change the way we do things.