From the telephone in your pocket to costly smartwatches, now we have the flexibility to assemble tons of well being and health data. The issue is present well being monitoring is just not sensible sufficient to make that knowledge helpful.
Well being Monitoring on an Island
Good units have allowed us to simply observe issues that might beforehand have required specialised medical gear. You may stroll into Finest Purchase and spend $100 or much less on a tool that may report your coronary heart fee each second of the day. That’s fairly wonderful.
Coronary heart fee, after all, is only one of many issues we will now observe with telephones and wearables. It’s also possible to observe your sleep, every day steps, water consumption, weight loss plan, energy, exercises, physique composition, weight, and extra. In the event you actually dive in, you possibly can be taught quite a bit about your physique.
The issue is the present state of well being monitoring may be very segregated. Certain, you possibly can observe all of the issues talked about above, however that knowledge largely stays remoted by itself little islands. That significantly limits how helpful it may be to you.
Well being Knowledge Wants Context
The vital part that’s lacking from sensible well being monitoring is context. Sleep monitoring is an ideal instance of this downside. Carrying an Apple Watch whilst you sleep isn’t really useful if the info doesn’t have context.
In the event you observe sleep like most individuals, you most likely get up, have a look at the helpful little graph of your sleep cycles, utter one thing about the way you want extra deep sleep, after which do completely nothing to make that occur. How may you? That chart doesn’t present any actionable data.
To make significant adjustments, you’d want to determine what’s inflicting the shortage of deep sleep. Do you sleep worse once you don’t get sufficient steps? Are sure meals earlier than bedtime disrupting your sleep? Are excessive stress ranges making it onerous to go to sleep?
All of the well being knowledge on the planet isn’t very useful if it’s all the time remoted. We’d like to have the ability to combine the info and make significant correlations.
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Smarter Well being Monitoring
Sleep monitoring is only one space that would profit from smarter well being and health knowledge. The identical downside exists in monitoring exercises, weight, stress, and extra. We now have the flexibility to report and observe tons of knowledge, however the apps aren’t serving to us put it to good use.
Let’s say I observe my sleep and the way a lot water I drink each day—two fairly easy issues to do with Samsung Well being. Once I go for a run—additionally utilizing Samsung Well being—it might be nice if the app may present me how my efficiency is worse once I sleep poorly or don’t drink sufficient water.
My state of affairs isn’t even a tough one—I’m placing all the info into the identical app and it’s nonetheless not getting used to make connections. What should you observe well being and health with a couple of completely different apps? Apple Well being and Google’s Well being Join appear like they may assist with this, however the issue is identical.
Google’s Well being Join permits apps to share data between one another. Your every day energy can sync from MyFitnessPal to Samsung Well being, however that’s basically the identical as should you recorded it in Samsung Well being to start with. The information continues to be not getting used to indicate correlations.
Proper now, it’s as much as us to do the legwork and discover the connections that we will use to make significant adjustments. Even the finest health trackers aren’t sensible sufficient to do it for us. It’s lengthy overdue for “sensible” well being monitoring to make this simpler.
