Can commercially available wearables take the prevention and early detection of disease to a new level by enabling continuous longitudinal assessment of our health status?
Findings from the exciting new study from Stanford/Duke teams support this view.
Only scratching the surface of what’s possible, the authors find that the conventional vital signs such as the resting heart rate estimated from wearables predict better [= lower prediction error] clinical laboratory test results than when such vital signs are obtained in the clinic.
Not surprisingly, personalized predictive models performed better than population-level models. The considerably more fine-grained temporal resolution of individual biological variability possible with the existing wearables is what is most likely enabling these promising results.
See the article here: https://lnkd.in/gQKwZwH
Importantly, the authors note that
1) “The potential to detect dehydration using wearables may be particularly useful in older adults who are at heightened risk of dehydration due to age-related physiological changes, including decreased thirst.”
2) “[…] one in five people in the United States regularly wears a smartwatch …”