Watch Health (w-health)

Abstract

Smart watches have been available for quite some time now. However,with the announcement ofApple Watchby Apple Inc., strong buzz about smart watches has been created. A highly anticipated success of Apple watches can also be linked to an expected increase in the smart watch market in the very near future. Apart from Apple, other big companies such as Sony, Motorola, Nike have their own brand of smart watches. Therefore, strong market competition would arise leading to competitive prices, technologies, and designs which would possibly lead to increased popularity of smart watches. Following the recent announcement of apple watch, several online and newspaper articles have suggested that the most important application of Apple watch would be in the field of healthcare. This is also backed by the applications available in the Apple watch which includes GPS tracking, gyroscope, accelerometer, pulse monitor, calorie counter, activity tracker, Siri voice tracker, and host of various other applications. Further, the Apple watch is backed by powerful operating systems and hardware processors. This buzz about the smart watches arises one question - How effective can these smart watches be used for providing healthcare solutions? The use of smart devices for healthcare services has been topic of extensive research for the last decade which has resulted in developing several healthcare solutions for various types of disease management, patient monitoring especially for chronic lifetime diseases and old people. With the emergence of smart watches, now it is time to further explore the possibility of using smart watches for healthcare services. Some of the advantages of smart watches for healthcare services are: ?They are easily wearable and portable and can almost be part of everyday attire similar to regular watches. ?They are relatively cheaper than other smart devices such as smart mobile phones and similar gadgets. ?With the advancements in hardware and software technologies they are now as powerful as high-end smart phone and can host several types of applications. ?They can be adapted and customised to provide various disease diagnosis and management according to the individual patient needs. ?The smart watches can include several sensors and also provide platform for software applications for patient health monitoring and reporting. ?With the use of voice based applications such as Siri, patients having difficulty to use modern gadgets or to read and write can also use the device more easily. There is no doubt that iWatch or other smart watches not only provide numerous possibilities of adapting and implementing existing smart healthcare solutions but also new platform for developing novel solutions for healthcare. The research and development in the current mobile-health solutions should now also focus their attention towards research in developing smart watches based healthcare solutions. Hence, watch health (w-health) is division of electronic health practice, which is defined as a medical practice supported with the use of smart watches technology which includes smart watches, smart mobile phones, wireless devices, patent monitoring devices and many others