Wearables have been gaining steady traction over the last decade. One of the most prominent starts to this industry was with FitBit, which took the concept of patient health analytics and made it simple by offering a patient-friendly wearable device that is easy to use and low maintenance. Then came a wide variety of other form factors, such as smart rings, smart earphones and even other bracelet type devices that could unlock the power of individualized patient data to help inform healthcare decisions.
As the industry started to mature, a new paradigm emerged: an effort to make these wearables and ambient tracking devices even more seamless and integrated into daily life. This is where concepts such as Meta’s AI glasses shine; the idea being not to add another wearable to an individual’s everyday entourage, but rather infuse sensing technology and AI powered analytics directly into a form factor that is already widely in use, such as prescription glasses.
Now, with compute power increasingly being developed into smaller formats, new opportunities are emerging which allow for more creative means to utilize this technology and make it even more seamless. One such growing area is the concept of ambient home health monitoring, or ambient assisted living. This entails a integrating non-wearable sensors throughout the home into the routines of daily living, creating a frictionless experience. As human behavior has always been one of the biggest aspects of wearable adoption, an ambient home solves for convenience and effortless health tracking. A recent article in the journal Sensors discusses the fact that unobtrusive health monitoring in the home enables a new degree of continuity. While conventional sensors and wearables aim to collect health information at the point-of-care, “a smart home can continuously or over shorter time intervals monitor its resident’s health status while the resident is doing daily activities, unaffected by the measurements. This monitoring may capture a comprehensive picture of a person’s health and functional status and critical changes or events.”
Why is this valuable?
Because the majority of a persons “living” happens in their home, often in their most native and relaxed states. While wearables can also be worn and be used to track measurements at home, the reality is that many patients often take these off once they are home or may not be paying as close attention to the differences between their rest states vs. active states. Furthermore, “wearable fatigue” is a growing phenomenon. While there is a large cohort of people that want to increase wearable use to track their health data at a more granular level, there is also a large group of individuals that want to “disconnect.” Ambient home tracking could be a much less invasive solution for the latter cohort.
There are many potential applications for this technology that could truly help improve patient outcomes. A recent study showed that environmental sensors can help detect changes in gait speed and stride to help determine cognitive decline. Another showed that smart home technologies that ambiently detect movement, bathroom usage, sleep duration and walking speed can be effective in monitoring cancer medication adverse events and outcomes. Other use cases can entail collection of longitudinal, long-term data that can be used at the population level to help inform public health and overall systemic healthcare interventions. Indeed, the possibilities are endless.
However, the key consideration will be privacy and data protection. While wearables were already a hard enough curve to convince people on regarding constant data collection, embedding sensors and ways to collect data inside people’s homes will be an even higher threshold to surmount. Designers of these technologies have to be sensitive to the fact that consumers will invite these tools into their personal lives and homes, meaning that privacy and the scope of what will be collected must be incredibly strict. Furthermore, the data collection and aggregators of these metrics have to be even more careful. As healthcare cybersecurity breaches have reached an all-time high over the last decade, protecting this data will be as important as the protections afforded to confidential, patient data in other healthcare settings.
Nevertheless, if developed carefully and thoughtfully, there many significant benefits that can be gained with this technology.