Fitness: Wearable technology helps you monitor your daily health

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One of my first forays into merging technology and personal fitness was with a Nike + iPod Sport Kit, circa 2006. The Sport Kit was an evolution of my Timex Sport watch and included a small sensor that fit in my shoe and a receiver that plugged in could be in my ipod nano. The duo tracked my runs in terms of distance, speed and calories burned, with real-time feedback via headphones. The accompanying Nike Run app, which was considered state of the art at the time, archived my stats for later viewing and replaced the old pen and paper run journal with lots of cool graphs and dates.

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Sixteen years later, the sensor and iPod have long since been phased out in favor of an Apple Watch that collects a wealth of workout stats from all my favorite activities. It recognizes what strokes I’m swimming, the average number of strokes I do per swim length, how many steps I take per day, how long I’ve been sitting, my VO2 max (average and per workout), heart rate variability (the length of time between heartbeats), blood oxygen levels, stride length, smooth running, speed and asymmetry, and how fast I go up and down the stairs.

With this wealth of data, I get personalized insights on how my stats compare to healthy norms and custom messages when my training habits change. The clock also features my favorite playlists and does a pretty good job of telling the time.

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According to Statistica, 216 million people worldwide wear smartwatches on their wrists. Wearable technology made the top 3 of the American College of Sports Medicine’s annual list of fitness trends from 2016 to 2022, and has been #1 for five of those years. The Apple Watch leads the market share, but Fitbit, Garmin, and Polar have their own Models each with a set of features.

As the fitness market is already convinced of the value of wearables, smartwatches are increasingly expanding their focus into the complementary world of health. Equipped with sensors, the Apple Watch can take a single-lead EKG (electrocardiogram), notify its user of abnormally high or low heart rates and irregular rhythms, monitor blood oxygen and respiratory rate, and detect a sudden fall, which should send notifications to an emergency contact User incapacitated. And with a variety of companion apps and its own health app, it can track and log sleep patterns and menstrual and fertility cycles, create a medication schedule and reminders, and store medical records including vaccinations, allergies, and lab results.

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As most of us carry and carry our devices with us every day, the data collected by the smartphone and smartwatch combo offers insight into our habits, without the subjective filter of self-reporting. That’s huge when it comes to health decisions. Apple reports that it can collect more than 150 types of health data, including the number of minutes and hours we sleep, sit and move, and how our heart and lungs respond to our daily lifestyle.

But this data is not only usable on a personal level. Smartwatch users can share their health information and insights with their healthcare providers and family members, which can spark meaningful conversations and bring peace of mind to loved ones.

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“The idea is really how we can provide continuous monitoring of patients in a relatively unobtrusive way that allows us to detect a change in patient status before they actually get to the hospital,” said Heather Ross, director of the Department of Cardiology at the University Health Network’s Peter Munk Cardiac Center in Toronto, in a report published by Apple.

On a larger scale, the capacity for data collected by our devices to advance research into health conditions is remarkable. With the user’s permission, Apple allows health and exercise data to be securely shared with the research community through its Research app, a practice that has led to several high-impact studies on women’s health, heart health, mobility and mental health. And while not all wearable devices pay the same attention to privacy or the ability to filter what personal information is shared, there is potential for leveraging this vast collection of health and fitness data from tens of millions of users worldwide to advance advances in human health Supporting science, big exciting.

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Fitbit and activity app Strava review the vast amount of data compiled by their users to present an annual overview of global exercise trends. Not only is it interesting to get accurate data on how much we exercise and sleep, but it also offers a better understanding of the health and fitness habits of different communities around the world. That’s quite an evolution from the early days of wearables, when we were pretty excited about real-time tracking of how many steps we took throughout the day — not to mention a huge advance over a shoe sensor that wasn’t in place would stay and it did I don’t like puddles and mud.