Wearables, towards a new patient-doctor relationship

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I've felt a little silly meeting people recently, even on Zoom calls. I have two smartwatches on my left wrist, an activity tracker on my right wrist, and one of my fingers has the same smart ring worn by Kendall Roy, the spoiled mogul from HBO's 'Succession' series. .

I was intrigued by the future of “wearables” at the start of the pandemic, when a researcher told me that the patient-doctor relationship was going to experience the medical equivalent of the Protestant Reformation. According to him, like ordinary people who have access to the Bible in their native language, patients will soon use wearable technologies to better understand their condition and develop a treatment plan with their doctor instead of just nod.

Complete health monitoring in complete autonomy

I already had an Apple Watch, but I think of it mostly as a device for texting and emailing. It does a good job of tracking during my running and rowing sessions, but its Achilles heel is the 18-hour battery life. If you want to track health, you need to track recovery. Eighteen hours means charging it while you sleep or being alert enough to charge it twice a day.

“Patients will soon use wearable technology to better understand their condition and develop a treatment plan with their doctor instead of just nodding”

Today, we are witnessing the emergence of a number of devices that can boast of having an autonomy of several days and which, thanks to increasingly impressive sensors, are beginning to pass from the status of trackers of activity to that of a complete health monitor. Among them are the third generation Oura, a discreet ring with a battery life of up to seven days, the Whoop 4.0, an activity tracker for elite athletes with a battery life of five days, and the Amazfit GTR 3 Pro, a complete smartwatch that lasts between 10 and 14 days on a charge.

I found Oura to be the most accurate, thanks to a stable fit and its proximity to the arteries. It tracks sleep, workouts, and heart rate throughout the day, and can even tell you're sick before symptoms appear. Harpreet Singh Rai, Managing Director of Oura, says: “Just as I know the mechanic needs to see my vehicle, I know the doctor needs to see me. I think this is the future of this technology”.

If that seems unlikely to you, know that I tried to overcome sinus and cough issues this week, and Oura noticed. Last night he gave me an “optimal” sleep score of 88 because I slept almost 11 hours. But my “readiness” score hit an alert level of 65, due to elevated heart rate and body temperature. In the morning, the Oura app asked me if I was sick and recommended that I switch to “rest mode”.

“Oura, a discreet ring tracks sleep, workouts and heart rate throughout the day, and can even tell you're sick before symptoms appear”

The Whoop exhibits similar characteristics, but had difficulty interpreting my idiosyncratic sleep patterns due to being a night owl and having a toddler. Three days ago, Oura accurately determined that I slept six hours and eight minutes, but Whoop estimated that I slept 90 minutes and took a two and a half hour "nap". Whoop is a better tracker for high-intensity activities, though. It displays my real-time heart rate via the iPhone app and you can wear it 24 hours a day as it charges wirelessly on the wrist.

Intelligent activity scores

The most intriguing product I tested was the Amazfit GTR 3, an Apple Watch rival that seems more sophisticated as a health device. Instead of Apple's three "activity rings" for calories burned, exercise, and standing time, it gives users an algorithm-derived "personal activity intelligence" score. , based on a continuous stream of heart rate, activity and lifestyle data, which is averaged on a rolling seven-day basis. The moving average is essential. Intense training days should be followed by a recovery period. But if my device resets every morning, I may feel pressured to reach the necessary threshold every day. The result: exhaustion.

The 10+ day battery life is also a revelation. For the wearables market to grow as expected (from less than $17 billion last year to over $118 billion in 2028), people need to be able to “set and forget” their devices. As of this writing, my Amazfit is still at 21% and I'm not the least bit worried - the wearable tech equivalent of the end of "range anxiety". ” at Tesla.

Wearables are interfering in the patient-doctor relationship

Each of these devices brings us closer to a new patient-doctor relationship, a trend that seems inevitable as fewer and fewer people trust institutions. Anne Wojcicki, CEO of personal genomics group 23andMe, said authority and hierarchy in medicine cause too many patients to leave the doctor's office feeling stupid and fill the void with something that seems accessible – witness the rise of misinformation on social media. Wearables offer the promise that people could instead arm themselves with months of personal biometric data to see which treatments work and which don't.

“Wearables offer the promise that people could arm themselves with months of personal biometric data to see which treatments work and which don't”

As these products become more widespread, we could come closer to the prediction made a decade ago by American physician Eric Topol: “The digitization of human beings will make the expression 'the doctor knows everything' a travesty”.

Patrick McGee, FT

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