The Rise of Wearable Health and Fitness
The wearable healthcare device market is on the rise! With new kinds of wearable devices, understanding your body and health has become easier than ever. The wearable market has grown significantly given advances in technology, the production of personal devices, and the increased desire of people looking to monitor and track their health and wellness efforts.
Healthcare wearables now come in a variety of forms with use cases for wearables in extending from consumers collecting fitness data to healthcare providers and insurers using wearables to improve health outcomes. This infographic provides information about the different wearable devices in the health care space and shows where the wearable healthcare market is heading.
What Drives the Growing Adoption of Wearable Devices in the Healthcare Sector?
People nowadays are more conscious about their health and look for tangible benefits from their regular use of wearables. The growing interest of consumers’ in quantifying personal health metrics has created an increased demand for health tracking devices. In order to meet this growing need, different consumer and healthcare manufacturing vendors’ have joined together for offering advanced solutions for personalized healthcare and effective management of diseases.
The small form factor is what makes wearable devices more popular. These devices offer flexibility in use allowing patients to continually monitor health at their convenience. Personalized, immediate, and goal-oriented feedback based on specific data tracking is the greatest advantage it can provide. Users can track things like how many steps are taken in a day, calories burned, average heart rate, and more. This enables people to exercise smarter and achieve their fitness and wellness goals in new and alternatives ways.
Adoptions of health care wearables in medical practices also help doctors to diagnose and discuss potential health symptoms. In the same way it has provided greater information for general consumers, it has also opened up new alternatives to traditional ways healthcare providers have interacted with patients, performed tests, gathered data and provided treatments.
Tech giants such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, LG, and Samsung have already jumped into the healthcare wearable market with products like smartwatches, wristbands, and more. Accompanying this trend, the electronic and medical device manufacturers started introducing different kinds of innovative health management wearable devices. These devices come in different forms such as sports watches, activity trackers, smart shoes, chest straps, etc. and getting a lot of attention among people.
Apple’s HealthKit imposed some significant impact on the healthcare wearable marketplace. HealthKit, a software framework that was formally introduced in July 2014, allows sharing of information among devices. This has opened up new opportunities to share information among paired applications much faster and at a lower cost. Apps created with HealthKit SDK can provide more comprehensive health and fitness data than available from standalone wearable devices. Along with promoting HealthKit to developers, Apple also partnering with healthcare and EMR providers to integrate HealthKit into their clinical operations. This has immensely raised the opportunities of using healthcare wearables to diagnose, treat and monitor patient care.
Wearable Mobile Health App Usage
According to the survey conducted by Accenture, the number of people who use wearable devices and apps for monitoring their health has doubled in the past two years. The survey states that, 40 % of the wearable users they have surveyed use health apps and shared mobile app data with their doctors. 59 % of the consumers frequently used health apps for fitness, 52 % for diet/nutrition, 36% for symptom navigation, and 28% for accessing their patient portal respectively. Businesses in a variety of industries have explored these opportunities for utilizing health data from their consumers and patients to increase efficiency and improve services associated with healthcare.
Of course, every wearable device needs an app. Taking advantage of this trend custom mobile app development services have started to give more emphasis to wearable application development. For more information on how to develop health or fitness apps for wearable technology call (603) 881-9200, or click the button below. Zco Corporation delivers end-to-end solutions to help companies conceptualize, design, and develop mobile applications, enterprise software, and more.
