No matter your fitness endeavor – whether that be running an ultramarathon, practicing yoga, backcountry adventuring or even just strolling the dog – wearable technology may help enhance your fitness journey.
These devices can help guide healthier decisions and motivate you to maintain healthy behaviors, but should not serve as a replacement for regular physical examinations or nutritional counseling sessions.
What is wearable technology?
Wearable technology includes devices that can be worn by an individual to monitor and track their activities, such as distance travelled, calories burned and heart rate measurements. Furthermore, some wearable tech devices even monitor sleep trends.
Wearable devices can also be utilized for healthcare purposes, including monitoring blood pressure, heart rate and glucose levels as well as patient activity during treatments or surgeries.
Wearable technology offers many unique advantages, and one of its chief advantages is providing users with just-in-time coaching to make healthier decisions. This could range from reminding them to take medication or finding restaurants offering healthy fare nearby, to tracking an individual’s progress over time, which is particularly beneficial when dealing with chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension.
How can wearable technology help me?
Wearable technology is powered by miniature computers similar to those found in smartphones, allowing it to track our movements and collect information such as heart rate and distance traveled.
Wearable devices can play an invaluable role in keeping us healthy by encouraging the creation of healthier habits and providing just-in-time coaching to ensure we reach our goals – this can be particularly helpful for chronic conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure.
Some medically-focused wearables can help us monitor our stress levels and sleep patterns to ensure we lead healthy lifestyles (Mishra, Mishra, Tripathy & Dutta 2020). There are even smart garments such as Levi’s jacket designed with Google Project Jacquard technology containing electrical fibers that allow users to answer calls or play music directly from their sleeves!
Healthcare providers can use wearables to provide patients with detailed data about their chronic disease progression, which can then be used to create effective treatment plans and support healthier habits.
What are the benefits of wearable technology?
Wearable technology can help track and improve key fitness metrics, keep you motivated by providing daily activity reports and encouraging messages, and keep you safe – for instance, the Apple commercial featuring the surfer who used his watch to call for help when being pulled out to sea by waves is a perfect example of this!
Beyond traditional fitness trackers, wearable tech gadgets now exist for almost every aspect of life imaginable – from compression shirts that warn you if muscles are being pulled to sweat-absorbing underwear that prevents odor – there’s something out there for every taste and lifestyle!
Understanding the distinctions between wellness and medical data as well as wearable tech is essential. Fitness devices that monitor heart rate can potentially screen for AFib (atrial fibrillation), but aren’t intended to diagnose heart disease or detect arrhythmias; similarly, their accuracy varies from device to device.
What are the disadvantages of wearable technology?
Wearable technology companies face an enormous challenge in cultivating lasting customer engagement, particularly when providing medical wearables to older individuals, working professionals or people suffering from chronic diseases and ailments.
Another drawback of these devices is their failure to use end-to-end encryption, leaving data vulnerable to hacking and misuse by third parties. This poses a grave danger to personal security as you could be tracked using this information stored on them.
Wi-Fi or Bluetooth technology is required by many devices to communicate, which can result in a dramatic spike in electricity bills for your device. This may present significant challenges to low-income populations who struggle to afford both these expenses as well as preexisting class divides and social issues.
