Getting consumers comfortable with medical biosensors
Biosensor health technology gives individuals the ability to take control of their health. Sensors create useful data, which emphasizes preventive care, explains Amar Kendale.
Transcript
Compliance is actually this really tough nut to crack. And it-- it's a problem with medicines, it's a problem with diagnostics, it's
a problem across the board. And so the way to get to compliance from our perspective is you have to drop that bar.
You have to reduce the friction, reduce the requirement of the user, reduce the change in behavior. And then offer, as a lure, as a reward,
something that the user will actually consider a reward. People really want to collect data in a way that's going to fit their lifestyle where
that risk-reward equation makes sense on a routine basis.
So a biosensor's one step towards reducing that bar, reducing the friction. And I think it's the long-term dream here,
I think everyone shares this in the technology community in health care, is, you know, you wish you could have data about people in real-time
all the time. I think that's still-- we're still a ways away from that, and that's not what's happening in two or three years.
I think the reality is, it's a series of steps, and the goal is, over time, to widen this window, to increase
that access to the information. It's one of the reasons that the health care system is overburdened, is because people go and enter the health care system when they are already sick.
So when you get to a physician, you have a problem. When you get to a hospital, you actually need a hospital. You don't go there if you're just
feeling a little bit funny. You go there because you have a serious condition of some kind that needs you to be in the hospital. So the idea that you can actually
avoid that, avoid that high cost, high acuity, extremely intense hospital environment
will ultimately save our health care system. And instead of having to force doctors and nurses
and other providers to manage sort of large bodies of junky data, we can now give them small bodies of highly impactful data
to process and provide that human judgment that's going to make the quality of care ultimately better. Across the board, none of this matters unless you have insight.
Unless you have some kind of way to distill the data into some sort of piece of information that matters that's going to change behavior.
That just taking your heart rate, you can actually open up a huge amount of new data to analyze. So heart rate variability is a great example.
It's that same data analyzed in a slightly different way, and it's been shown to actually tell you things about stress. You know, so the variability in your heart rate
can actually give you enormous insight into how stressed you are. Ultimately, what we have to be able to provide-- the health care system has to be able to provide
is insight that's going to give patients and consumers the ability to take control of their health
in a way that's going to give them some early feedback that something's happening, that something good is happening based on the action that they're taking.
We in the community of developing these technologies, how do we communicate to the wearers of electronics
what the value is that's going to come out of taking this data and sharing it with different players in the ecosystem, whether that's providers or payers or other technology
companies? I think that there are certainly concerns, but again, there's huge opportunity to do good things with that information.
health screening
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