Activity trackers are making significant strides in India’s healthcare system by providing innovative solutions and supporting healthier lifestyles. India's wearable device market is booming, on track to reach $1.26 billion by 2025, with fitness trackers and health-monitoring gadgets becoming increasingly prevalent.
Wearable technology includes devices that can be placed on the limbs, torso, or head such as watches, bracelets, phones, glasses, head-mounted displays, hearing aids, suits, belts, shoes, and patches that can measure various physiological parameters, which include heart rate, rhythm, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, skin temperature, steps travelled, calorie expended estimates, blood glucose levels, and UV radiation exposure. This data can be used for detection of aberrant parameters for clinical diagnosis or prognosis to provide biological feedback to the user thereby aiding in monitoring, and even as an educational tool for promoting health and physical fitness.
Empowering Chronic Health Management: Activity trackers are proving to be a game-changer for those with chronic conditions, offering constant monitoring of crucial health statistics. This helps in managing conditions more effectively and can lead to timely medical interventions.
Connecting Accessible & Remote Healthcare: Activity trackers serve as a bridge to accessible healthcare, reducing the need for constant hospital visits. They offer a glimpse of hope for equitable healthcare distribution, even in the most remote areas.
Fostering Preventive Healthcare: These devices are at the forefront of a preventive health revolution, empowering individuals to make informed decisions about physical activity, sleep, and nutrition. This proactive approach could lead to a reduction in lifestyle-induced health issues. Women’s healthcare benefits immensely from remote healthcare and chronic health management.
Inspiring Public Health Policies: The collective data from wearable devices provides an unprecedented insight into public health trends. This anonymized data is pivotal for crafting effective health strategies and informing policy decisions at a national level. The Indian Government has already initiated the Ayushman Bharat (Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana) initiative aimed at providing free health insurance coverage of up to 5 lakh Indian Rupees per family per year to over 100 million economically disadvantaged families. This also triggers insurance companies to reward healthy lifestyles.
Predictive Health at Your Wrist: Activity trackers, working together with AI and machine learning, contribute to the development of predictive health analytics, allowing for early identification and management of potential health risks.
Telemedicine's New Frontier: The integration of activity trackers with telemedicine provides a comprehensive view of a patient's health, allowing for better-informed remote consultations and more precise medical guidance.
Cultivating Health Consciousness: With AI's analytical power, activity trackers are not just gadgets but coaches, encouraging a proactive stance on health and nudging users towards healthier routines.
Personalized Health Guidance: Activity trackers feed personalized data into AI-driven health platforms, enabling the creation of diet and exercise plans that are tailored to the user's daily activity levels and health goals.
Developing communities: These devices bring together communities of like-minded participants in the healthcare eco system off patients, care givers and medical professionals, enabling knowledge sharing and personalized care.
This synergy of wellness seekers and health care devices like activity trackers, promises a future where healthcare is more proactive, personalized, and accessible to all. This will work towards an ‘Ayushman Bharat’ in the long run!
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