Rx trends 2015: Wearables

NEW YORK — With the development and use of innovative wearable health devices and smartphone health apps exploding, the decentralization of health care will likely reach a crescendo in 2015.

 

Increasingly, consumers and physicians are embracing technologies that can continuously monitor a host of such physical conditions as heartbeat, lipid levels, medication adherence or motion — and wirelessly transmit the data to a host computer or smartphone. The effect, PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted in a recent report on disruptive health trends, will be an increasing movement toward mobile health care and patient empowerment.

 

“Wearable tech and smartphone-linked devices will turn consumers’ homes into mini-clinics as DIY healthcare gains steam,” PwC asserted in a report titled “Top health industry issues of 2015.”

 

The Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems puts the market for wearable devices at a minimum of $6 billion by 2016. With a slew of new breakthrough products recently unleashed or set to debut this year, however — Apple’s smart watch and a smart contact lens from Google and Novartis that helps diabetics monitor and manage their conditions among the most widely anticipated — that figure may prove conservative. Also driving the market: adhesive bandages and patches that can track and record heart activity and other conditions, shirts incorporating diagnostic tools and a wristband that reportedly uses light waves to detect post-meal metabolism.

 

“Given the rapid pace of development over the past few years, an acceleration of innovation can be expected with a surge in innovative technologies becoming available for use,” the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics reports. “How these technologies are applied to the issues of healthy aging and how they are deployed to bring the largest benefit at the lowest cost remains to be seen.”