Smart and smarter. The battle for the "smartest" watch

Following on from a blog post I wrote at the beginning of January the media attention around smart watches seems to have reached fever pitch. Thanks to @Paul_Sonnier's Digital Health Group on LinkedIn I came across this article about how Samsung are already launching their second generation smart watch. From what I can gather it does pretty much what the original Samsung Gear did, but has been redesigned to be more ergonomically sound.

As the article appears on a site called 9 to 5 Mac it's hardly surprising that the majority of the discussion is around when Apple are going to launch their smart watch. This article from a few days ago is quite fascinating, suggesting that Apple's new smart watch (note no-one is saying that Apple won't go down this route) is going to have way more health data functionality that just movement sensing.

As mentioned previously, although valuable, there has to be more to wearable devices that purely movement tracking to make them truly useful health management adjuncts for the masses. Jawbone, Nike and Fitbit have all done great jobs of taking the humble pedometer and transforming it into a piece of tech that can be integrated seamlessly into daily life (albeit with a slight bump in the road for the Fitbit Force), but this surely is just a first step.

For most of us our wristwatch is the only item we wear every day. It therefore makes sense to use it as the conduit to capture health related data. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility to have a wristwatch continuously monitor heart rate, body temperature and movement throughout the day. Add to this an inference on how much sleep one is getting at night time (I say "inference" as all of the sleep monitoring apps and devices rely on interpreting movement, or lack of movement, at night time to crudely quantify sleep duration and quality) and you have a data stream that would be extremely useful in monitoring individuals with a number of chronic diseases.

Take for example someone with COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), a condition affecting 6.8% of US adults. Individuals with COPD are prone to "exacerbations" where a simple viral respiratory infection can lead to severe shortness of breath, copious mucus production and sometimes a super-imposed bacterial infection. If left unchecked an exacerbation can be life threatening and invariably requires hospital admission, however, if caught early and treated with antibiotics and steroids hospitalization can often be avoided. Now imagine someone with COPD wearing a smartwatch continuously transmitting data back to their provider. Their heart rate will increase a day or two before they start to feel unwell, their temperature may also increase. In addition, as the infection starts to take hold they'll probably feel more breathless and so won't be moving around as much as they normally do. The combination of these three data streams should be enough to identify an exacerbation at an early stage. With this early identification comes the ability to treat and the real possibility of avoiding a hospital admission. Now that to anyone's mind has to be a victory for health tech!

Prevalence of COPD in the United States. Image from CDC website: http://www.cdc.gov/features/copdadults/copdadults_a600px.jpg