{"id":17570,"date":"2024-12-02T00:36:30","date_gmt":"2024-12-02T01:36:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=17570"},"modified":"2024-12-02T02:26:12","modified_gmt":"2024-12-02T02:26:12","slug":"why-are-doctors-wary-of-wearables","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=17570","title":{"rendered":"Why are doctors wary of wearables?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Wearable tech \u2013 currently dominated by smart watches – is a multi-billion dollar industry with a sharp focus on health tracking.<\/p>\n

Many premium products claim to accurately track exercise routines, body temperature, heart rate, menstrual cycle and sleep patterns, among others.<\/p>\n

Health Secretary Wes Streeting has talked about a proposal to give wearables<\/a> to millions of NHS patients in England, enabling them to track symptoms such as reactions to cancer treatments, from home.<\/p>\n

But many doctors \u2013 and tech experts \u2013 remain cautious about using health data captured by wearables.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I\u2019m currently trying out a smart ring from the firm Ultrahuman \u2013 and it seemed to know that I was getting sick before I did.<\/p>\n

It alerted me one weekend that my temperature was slightly elevated, and my sleep had been restless. It warned me that this could be a sign I was coming down with something.<\/p>\n

I tutted something about the symptoms of perimenopause and ignored it – but two days later I was laid up in bed with gastric flu.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t need medical assistance, but if I had \u2013 would the data from my wearable have helped healthcare professionals with my treatment? Many wearable brands actively encourage this.<\/p>\n

The Oura smart ring, for example, offers a service where patients can download their data in the form of a report to share with their doctor.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Dr Jake Deutsch, a US-based clinician who also advises Oura, says wearable data enables him to \u201cassess overall health more precisely\u201d \u2013 but not all doctors agree that it\u2019s genuinely useful all of the time.<\/p>\n

Dr Helen Salisbury is a GP at a busy practice in Oxford. She says not many patients come in brandishing their wearables, but she\u2019s noticed it has increased, and it concerns her.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think for the number of times when it\u2019s useful there\u2019s probably more times that it\u2019s not terribly useful, and I worry that we are building a society of hypochondria and over-monitoring of our bodies,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Dr Salisbury says there can be a large number of reasons why we might temporarily get abnormal data such as an increased heart rate, whether it\u2019s a blip in our bodies or a device malfunction – and many of them do not require further investigation.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m concerned that we will be encouraging people to monitor everything all the time, and see their doctor every time the machine thinks they\u2019re ill, rather than when they think they\u2019re ill.\u201d<\/p>\n

And she makes a further point about the psychological use of this data as a kind of insurance policy against shock health diagnoses. A nasty cancerous tumour for example, is not necessarily going to be flagged by a watch or an app, she says.<\/p>\n

What wearables do is encourage good habits – but the best message you can take from them is the same advice doctors have been giving us for years. Dr Salisbury adds: \u201cThe thing you can actually do is walk more, don\u2019t drink too much alcohol, try and maintain a healthy weight. That never changes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Apple Watch is reported to be the world\u2019s best-selling smart watch, although sales have slowed lately.<\/p>\n

Apple didn’t comment, but the tech giant uses true stories of people whose lives have been saved because of the heart tracking function of the device in its marketing, and anecdotally I have heard plenty of those too. What I haven\u2019t heard however, is how many cases of false positives there are.<\/p>\n

In many cases when patients present their data to healthcare professionals, clinicians prefer to try to recreate it using their own equipment, rather than simply trust what the wearable has captured.<\/p>\n

There are several reasons for this, says Dr Yang Wei, associate professor in wearable technologies at Nottingham Trent University \u2013 and they\u2019re all very practical.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you go to hospital, and you measure your ECG [electrocardiogram, a test that checks the activity of your heart], you don\u2019t worry about power consumption because the machine is plugged into the wall,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn your watch, you\u2019re not going to measure your ECG continuously because you drain your battery straight away.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition, movement \u2013 both of the wearable itself on a wrist, for example, and general movement of the person wearing it – can \u201ccreate noise\u201d in the data it collects, he adds, making it less reliable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"HelenHelen Salisbury<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
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Dr Wei points to the ring on my finger.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe gold standard to measure the heart rate is from the wrist or direct from the heart,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you measure from the finger, you\u2019re sacrificing accuracy.”<\/p>\n

It is the role of software to fill in such data gaps, he says – but there\u2019s no international standard for wearables here – for either the sensors and software that power wearable devices, or for the data itself, and even what format it is gathered in.<\/p>\n

The more consistently a device is worn, the more accurate its data is likely to be. But here\u2019s a cautionary tale.<\/p>\n

Ben Wood was out for the day when his wife received a series of alarming notifications from his Apple Watch, telling her he had been in a car crash. It advised her to text him rather than call because he may need to keep the line clear for the emergency services.<\/p>\n

The alerts were genuine, and sent to her as his emergency contact \u2013 but in this case unnecessary. Ben was out at a race track driving some fast cars. He admitted that he \u201cwasn\u2019t very gifted\u201d at it \u2013 but said he felt safe at all times.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe boundaries between incident and alert need to be managed carefully,\u201d he wrote in a blog post. \u201cI\u2019m curious to see how device-makers, emergency services, first responders and individuals think about this technology in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Pritesh Mistry, digital technologies fellow at the Kings Fund, agrees that there are significant challenges around folding current patient-generated data into our healthcare systems, and adds that the discussion has already been going on for several years in the UK without any clear resolution.<\/p>\n

He says there\u2019s \u201ca good case to be made\u201d for the use of wearables in the UK government\u2019s current drive to push care out of hospitals and into community settings.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut without that underpinning foundation of technology enablement in terms of the infrastructure, and supporting the workforce to have the skills, knowledge, capacity and confidence, I think it\u2019s going to be a challenge,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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