Consumers are placing a premium on health monitoring and enhancement as they ponder making adjustments to their lifestyles in the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic. Because of this, the market for wearable healthcare devices is likely to explode, from $27.29 billion in 2022 to $324.65 billion in 2032. This expansion is being fueled by the improved dependability and speed of 5G and higher networks, as well as the evolution of new technologies. In addition, emerging markets have been able to meet consumer demand for new prospects in the healthcare sector because of the sector’s particular needs and design forms. This article provides a summary of the three most popular categories of healthcare wearable devices, all of which can benefit users with better monitoring and general safety.
Rings for Preventative Care and Sleep Monitoring
Wearable health trackers have typically taken the form of smartwatches; products from Apple, Samsung, and Google offer great, widely available alternatives to the market leader, Fitbit. However, the relative inadequacy of the signal strength is a fundamental issue with the wrist as a biomedical monitoring point. Inaccurately regressing trends from vast volumes of data collected by early watches rendered them unusable to medical practitioners.
Finger biomedical signals are up to 10 times stronger than wrist signals2.Designers have created wearable smart rings that employ the fingers as the biomedical monitoring point in an effort to better detect and measure the user’s essential health indicators. The ring is equipped with medical-grade sensors like accelerometers, gyroscopes, and infrared LEDs, allowing for precise measurements.
Wearing a ring is considerably more comfortable than a chest strap or wristband to track your heart rate, sleep, temperature, movement, and breathing while you sleep. Critical to providing more exact data with much lower computing effort due to precise local measurements is the accuracy of the electronic components.
Emergency Bracelets and Pendants
Healthcare pendants are an emerging gadget that can support elders in critical situations, while many other wearables aim for seamless integration into daily life. They can monitor you around the clock, follow your whereabouts with GPS, and even sense if you’ve had a tumble. Some gadgets can even communicate in both directions with loved ones or emergency services via 5G cellular networks or Wi-Fi®.
Most of the functionality of the bracelets and pendants can be accessed without the user’s hands. For instance, built-in accelerometers help with fall detection, which is especially important for the elderly because 90% of them end up in a nursing home if they don’t get medical help within six hours3.
Transdermal Patches for Medicine Administration
A transdermal patch, which is applied to the skin and releases medication in that way, is another innovative form factor for healthcare wearable technology. These patches are loaded with a set amount of medication and release it gradually into the bloodstream through the skin. Although the idea is straightforward, transdermal patches can be administered in either an active or passive fashion.
Diffusion through the skin is the only method used by passive systems. Therefore, the dosage administered may differ from one user to the next due to differences in skin type and patch design. In contrast, active dose is more nuanced in the body. Microneedles, chemical enhancers, or electrical current on the order of 2-10 mA4 can be used in this method to puncture the skin and inject the medication at the prescribed time. These capabilities allow for more individualized approaches to patient care.
Iontophoresis, the method by which the electric current delivers the drug to the skin, calls for a unidirectional current to flow from the patch to the skin. The equipment that applies the current to the skin speeds up the absorption of the medicine. This method is helpful for treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and reducing inflammation because patients’ dosage requirements differ.
Conclusion
Even if there are obvious and essential benefits, like healthcare monitoring, aesthetics and price will still play a major role in determining whether or not a product is adopted by the market. Most consumers will consider the benefits when making a purchasing decision, but they won’t be as impressed if the gadget is cumbersome and looks like a meter. Engineers of such devices, then, need to think about how to incorporate electronics’ functioning within the bounds of marketing insights in order to create goods that people will really wear. Once that barrier is removed, widespread use of innovative wearable healthcare gadgets will improve consumers’ health by expanding their access to preventative treatment.
When compared to first-generation smartwatches, today’s wearable health devices are vast improvements. They’ve improved in precision and scope, becoming indispensable for users’ routine checkups, urgent care, and therapeutic interventions. Wearable gadgets allow doctors and patients to take a proactive, non-invasive approach to improving health outcomes and quality of life.