Smartwatch = personal life-saving device

A week ago, while I was queuing to pay for my groceries at a local supermarket, an old lady fainted and everyone was trying to support her while a young guy immediately called the ambulance. After about a minute or so, she woke up and wanted to go on her on way but she was still weak and people were advising her to stay put until the emergency response team arrived.

It was quite hard to convince her to stay put as she did not seem to understand English and could only utter a few words and generally did not trust people around her. When the emergency response team arrived, she refused to let them check her vital signs or bring her to the hospital. However, the emergency response team could not let her go as they needed her family member to accompany her home. Luckily, someone managed to get in contact with her nephew and he came and picked her up.

Thankfully things turned out to be okay.

Now imagine a bad scenario where she falls down from stairs or in the bathroom and no one can hear her. She will be incapacitated and won’t be able to call for help at all.

This got me thinking as the technology to potentially save her life is already here — a personal device that you wear everywhere you go and is able to call for help whenever you need it. Imagine a watch that is able to monitor your health condition and make the appropriate judgement to call for help when you need it.

Steps during an emergency situation

Let’s go through the sequence to replace all the manual effort that is being done in the above story and replace it with a similar process by a smartwatch.

1. She blacked out and fell.
2. Someone called for an ambulance.
3. Someone tried to calm her down.
4. Someone called her family members.
5. The emergency response team took her vital signs like blood pressure, heart rate and sugar level.
6. The emergency response team needed to pin point the location of the patient.
7. The emergency response team needed the identification number of the patient.

A smartwatch is technically capable of performing all the above functions in seconds.

1. It can detect fall by using an accelerometer sensor. A heart rate monitor can be used to confirm the condition of the patient.
2. The smartwatch can vibrate and inform the user that it is calling for help. If the user does not response to the vibration, an emergency response should be dispatched immediately.
3. The smartwatch can send an alert to the user’s family members.
4. The GPS in the smartwatch can help the emergency response team pin point the exact location of the user.
5. All the details about the user are readily available to the emergency response team including the insurance information or family members contact number.

All this can happen within seconds instead of minutes, and every second counts for people who are in a emergency situation.

What are the minimum features for a life-saving smart watch?

An article from seniorwise highlighted the potential usage of the smartwatches for the seniors and it matches some of the points that i observed as well.

In my opinion, there are 5 key features that a life-saving smartwatch should have.

1. Emergency call.
2. GPS location service.
3. Fall detection.
4. GSM radio capable.
5. Heart rate monitor

Here is a comparison of the smartwatches that are currently in the market:

It would seem that the only Samsung Gear S2 and Pebble 2 + heart rate + Pebble Core are the only devices that fulfill most of the conditions. Other devices would need to pair with a smartphone to get GPS location or to send and receive messages.

Samsung Gear S2 ($299 USD) is definitely more expensive and requires daily charging whereas Pebble 2 ($129) is cheaper and comes with 7 days battery life. The downside is that you have to buy the Pebble core separately.

Software and services

Dedicated app and services have to be developed to cater to fall detection and to have an emergency response team ready for those situation.

Lively has simple apps that seem to be able to cater to those situations but it has yet to be able to be integrated with the local emergency response system. Secondly, it is not common as compared to other smartwatches.

In my opinion, the services has to be part of the public services provided by the government and the network providers. It is already possible to place an emergency call with a phone without a SIM. The smartwatch should be able to do that as well. Once we have a smartwatch that is always on the lookout for us, there should be more use cases other than just detecting a fall and placing emergency call.

Preventive instead of reactive

In the future, it might be even possible to detect early signs of heart attack with ECG on the smartwatch and may even prevent those emergency situation.

The potential for the smartwatch as a personal life-saving device is limitless as it is one of the device that we wear daily and provides valuable insights by using various sensors to detect the state of our body. Once we have those insights, medical professionals can detect early signs of abnormalities and help prevent health that might otherwise gone undetected.

Platform For Personal Health

Smartwatch with open standard hardware and standard APIs endpoint will be crucial for it to be the window to one’s personal health. Once we have those, it will be easy for hardware manufacturers to integrate more sensors and developers can build health services on top of these smartwatches. Smartwatches are poised to be the platform for personal health. Entrepreneur and businesses should seize this opportunity to create services on top of this smartwatches.

Conclusion

A smartwatch that can be your personal life-saving device should be a generic mass market smartwatch that everyone can readily buy. Additionally, it should be integrated into the system of the emergency response team so that appropriate measures can be carried out as well. This would seem to be an ideal public project where a government should make this as part of the public health program and making sure the network providers are able to support this as part of their emergency call services. The smartwatch can even provide preventive measures to help detect early signs of health issues where we can take actions immediately. More importantly, smartwatches with open standard hardware and standard APIs will make it easy for businesses to build services on top of these devices and drives the next revolution of personal health.