Technology is evolving daily. You can own a self-driving car or a house-cleaning robot. Despite these conveniences, technology can have the biggest impact in healthcare, influencing professionals and our own daily choices for the better.
You can communicate with doctors remotely using telehealth.Smart phones and smart watches allow you to monitor your health from the comfort of your home. Remember when “health tracking” meant writing down your measurements on a piece of paper every weekend? Now, you can monitor everything with a simple, wearable device.
These health and fitness trackers can take many forms, like clip-on devices, watches, headsets, and even jewelry. Approximately 20% of people living in the United States own at least one of these devices.
How AI Is Helping Doctors Elevate Patient Care
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed dramatically from the early 2010s. We have gone from simple virtual assistants to full-blown conversational AI models. Now, medical companies can use the power of AI to develop medications and improve processes faster than any human being.
Atomwise, a technology-enabled pharmaceutical company, was able to treat the Ebola virus by using an AI. Google developed an AI that can provide analysis for breast cancer, and with the algorithm, it was able to exceed human radiologists’ performance by 11.5% on sets of data for breast cancer.
AI means you can track, analyze, and optimize your health in ways you never could before. It gives personalized recommendations and real-time feedback to help you achieve your goals.
Using Technology To Monitor Your Health At Home
Smartphones have built-in applications that can gather data in an organized and easy-to-understand manner. These apps are so advanced that they can track:
- Your daily steps – Showing you a graph of how many steps you take daily or how far you walk.
- Kilocalories – How many kilocalories do you burn in a day?
- Distance – Walking and running distance, and how fast you actually run.
- Sleep – Apps help you better understand your sleep patterns (and maybe how loud you snore at night).
These are just some of the features that these built-in apps can provide. If you want to take your health data more seriously, these apps are compatible with wearable devices like smartwatches, which are able to track your heart rate and rhythm, among others.
Using Tech To Make Better Daily Choices
Technology holds countless possibilities for advancing our health. For example:
- Hydration apps – Apps like WaterMinder, HydroCoach, and My Water track and manage your water intake. They also include features like alerts and personalized goals.
- Blood Glucose Management Apps – Options include mySugr, Glucose Buddy, which track glucose levels throughout the day. You can also pair and link these apps with a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM), which helps some people with diabetes better manage their condition. It provides real-time glucose data, trend information, and alerts for blood levels.
- Fitness apps – You can try Nike Training Club, MyFitnessPal and Fitbod. These applications can provide guided workouts as well as weight tracking data. They integrate with wearable fitness trackers to monitor your physical activities and provide insights into your fitness progress.
- Nutrition and Diet Tracking Apps – Apps like Cronometer, Lose It!, and Nutrisense all offer considerable benefits. In terms of physical well-being, diet is arguably the most crucial. These apps offer tools for logging meals, tracking calories, and providing valuable insights to help you get your dream body.
- Sleep Optimization Apps – Sleep Cycle, Sleeptracker, and Sleep Monitor optimize your sleep patterns and offer insights into optimizing your sleep environment.
How Technology Saves Your Life And Makes Doctors’ Jobs Easier
Healthcare professionals can monitor patients with a range of digital medical devices. These devices can send doctors information about the patient’s status and give reports on their condition. This information drives early detection and allows them to catch issues before they escalate.
According to Digital Authority Partners, big data in healthcare enables the monitoring of patient outcomes, making it easier to detect and assist patients with illnesses that may have been harder to identify without the right technology. Not only can it assist in monitoring, but it can also help reduce costs for healthcare providers.
How Can This Data Help Us Make Better Daily Choices?
Today’s innovations are just the beginning of what technology health data can do for us. We can transform healthcare with the power of technology and AI, moving from the monotony of handwritten notes to AI-driven diagnostics and chatbots, reducing wait times, automating appointment scheduling, and enhancing accessibility.
Health data helps individuals track their health and observe how it evolves, enabling them to make better daily choices and adapt their lifestyle accordingly. This could be the beginning of what technology can do for us. The future is looking bright, and it starts now, in the comfort of your home.