Counting your steps is so… pre-pandemic. Can that band on your wrist measure your heart rate? Can you monitor your blood pressure? Do you notice the first symptoms of Covid-XNUMX? Today's newest and best wearable fitness devices may already do a part of this, but they're still just a taste of the difficulty of data from your next fitness laptop. Here's why we're entering a brave new world for wearables, and what you can expect sticking to your body in the near future. Last year many of us took our fitness in our hands and at home. We work from home and we work from home. No wonder we are buying more wearable fitness devices and asking for more. “Wellness, fitness and activity tracking have become a priority for many,” Leo Gebbie, senior wearables and XR analyst at CCS Insight, says of the Covid-XNUMX pandemic. "Exercise and activity regimens have moved from gyms to the outdoors, making a smartwatch or fitness bracelet that tracks steps, distance, heart rate, and other activity metrics more attractive than ever to quite a few people.
(Image credit: Fitbit)
Fitness devices: trackers in front of smartwatches
If you want to know what's going on next to wearable fitness devices, just look at the smartwatch market. "Fitness trackers tend to see their feature set come from more advanced smartwatches," Gebbie says. "The advanced health tracking features of certain high-end smartwatches today may find their way to fitness trackers in time." However, even smartwatch manufacturers need to up their game. "Providing the basics is no longer enough," says Teg Dosanjh, head of technology and connected services at Samsung Electronics. "The last couple of years have seen an increase in the relevance of features and measurements...fitness enthusiasts expect products to incorporate blood pressure monitoring or electrocardiogram (ECG)."
(Image credit: Samsung) GPS and heart rate monitoring may be the must-have features of today, but those of tomorrow include ECG measurements, which can be found on the Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy Watch XNUMX and Fitbit Sense. This is serious medical follow-up that can spot medical conditions and sleep problems you don't even know you have. "We've gone from simply counting steps to delivering health information that was once available only in a lab or clinical setting, such as heart rate and sleep tracking, directly to users' wrists," says Dr. Conor Heneghan, Senior Fitbit Scholar. This is the initial step in fitness trackers noticing medical conditions and then helping monitor those conditions.
Fitness equipment: disease detection.
Dr. Heneghan says Fitbit is making progress in the areas of sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation, two of the most common medical problems worldwide, while recently released results from his COVID-2 study suggest his devices have the potential to identify signs of disease. before showing symptoms. . "As we all become increasingly interested in our health, the idea of disease detection is going to become even more relevant," says Dr. Heneghan. "We think wearable devices can help bridge the gap between doctor visits and facilitate conversations between patients and their doctor."
(Image credit: Fitbit) The downside with fitness wearables and smartwatches is that, now, they're as much about fashion as they are about health monitoring. Please note the limited battery life of the Apple Watch to forty-eight hours. All this will change. "The next generation of trackers is going to look at numbering on the theoretical side, so you're going to lose the always-on displays and the glowing displays to truly double things like blood sugar, blood pressure, respiratory rate, pain management and drug dosing," says Nicholas Kelly, co-founder of healthcare cluster Axela, whose cAIR:ID app gathers medical records and fitness tracker data to predict mini-strokes. He hopes to soon see more targeted surveillance from medical-grade devices that collect data on any and all vital signs that a health center would collect from a patient, but in the community.
Fitness equipment: adapted medical care?
Some think that data-driven adaptive medicine represents the future of healthcare, and that it's going to be powered by next-generation wearable fitness devices that passively monitor a person's heart rate and blood oxygen levels, to put it mildly. An example. The vision is a future in which health should be about surveillance, prevention and early intervention instead of solving medical problems. "We're going to be able to track changes over time, relative to an individual, rather than at an instant relative to a population," says Harry Briggs, a managing partner at OMERS Ventures, which has invested in technology companies health. "We may still be able to understand the root causes and provide people with positive feedback loops about the patterns of lifestyle choices that work best for their individual health." It could also mean that if you end up in the hospital with a medical problem, your doctor can easily access long-term data on your vital signs.
(Image credit: Fitbit)
Fitness devices: artificial intelligence
What to do with all this big data? Add a pinch of artificial intelligence (AI), obviously. So be prepared to make data-driven decisions about when and what foods to eat, how long to sleep, and when to exercise. “In the same way that Netflix learns what users like from TV shows and then makes recommendations, users increasingly expect more experiential training, personalization and smart recommendations,” says Jean-Michel Fournier, CEO of Les Mills. Half. He thinks that AI is going to play a key role in democratizing capacity for global good. “Healthier, fitter populations are simply better for the planet, from the transportation choices they make to the groceries they eat to the money they save in healthcare budgets, and artificial intelligence is going to be at the center. of this transformation.
Fitness Equipment: Tracking Nutrient Loss and Restoration
Algorithms that tell you which foods to eat, also known as "nutrient loss" and "restore tracking," are the next big thing in wearable fitness devices. Some devices already tell users how long it will take for their bodies to fully recover from their last workout. An effort to provide the kind of information that only a blood test could come from the nutrient loss algorithm app Fuelbetter, which retrieves data collected by wearable fitness devices. “Our algorithms provide high-resolution quantification of nutrients lost throughout your training and were developed from real and experimental data from athletes and non-athletes,” says Dr. Douglas McCabe, creator and director of Fuelbetter. "He also knows the deep nutritional content of every food on the planet." Fuelbetter tells you when you're missing a nutrient and exactly what you need to eat or drink to fix it by reverse engineering the recipes and information on the back of the package.
(Image credit: Fitbit)
Fitness clothing: elegant fabrics
Why use a fitness bracelet or smartwatch when your running gear
inteligente '' podría hacer su trabajo? Juniper Research pronostica que la 'Smart clothing' will bring more than €XNUMX billion to the sportswear market by XNUMX. Cue Apple, which has a patent for "smart canvas buttons" that could be used to connect not just devices, but clothing as well. Not to be outdone, Google's Project Jacquard uses wires, sensors and "buttons" to connect clothing to a phone.
A multi-colored screen fabric that exhibits softness and stability under distortion (Image credit: Huisheng Peng) Published in Nature last month is a new flexible, breathable, and durable electronic fabric that weaves conductive fibers and luminescent fibers with cotton to create a canvas screen "We are trying to integrate other electronic devices with textile screens, this is particularly promising for portable devices," says Huisheng Peng, a teacher from Fudan University in the city of Shanghai and a co-author of the article. "I think there is going to be a huge market for these new technologies." Others are not so sure. “The term smart fabrics and smart clothing has been floating around in the field of wearable clothing for quite some time,” says Gebbie. "But these garments have been unable to outperform niche offerings due to high cost, limited use cases, or both."
Portable fitness devices: 5G
There is now an army of wearable fitness devices, from smart bracelets and ``traditional'' smartwatches to shoes that collect biometric data while you run. How could it all fit together to give you a real world holistic view of your health in real time across all platforms and apps? The answer, obviously, is 5G. We're talking speeds a hundred times faster than 4G and virtually instantaneous network latency. And that means free tailored recommendations for an instant in real time and as many AR experiences as you can imagine. Wearable fitness devices can easily be considered a fad, but with more sensors, more meaningful data, and more artificial intelligence, they have the potential to change the health of billions upon billions of people. Not bad for a flexible rubber that counted the steps. Today's best Fitbit deals
