Health- Tech: How modern technologies are used to improve human wellbeing.
Our modern, interconnected world innovates at a rate never seen before in history. New technologies, new strategies, and a more globalized economy provide each and every one of us with more personal and business opportunities than ever before. While this is undoubtedly a positive development from an economic perspective, slowly more attention is being paid to the costs this modern lifestyle can have on a person’s physical as well as mental wellbeing. After all, while it may be second nature for many multinational companies to relocate their staff abroad when the need arises, this move can in fact be very stressful for the selected employee, resulting in personal struggles as well as a lower return on investment (ROI) for the company. Accordingly, there has been an increasing interest in utilizing modern technologies to improve, and perhaps one day to even enhance, people’s general sense of wellbeing.
Health- Tech
Technologies such as these are known as health-tech, or people-tech, and have started gaining lots of attention in recent months, due to their enormous potential in improving human health, and by extension, human wellbeing. While there has been an active interest in improving human health for a long time now, the focus on wellbeing is much more recent. These technologies come in a variety of different shapes and forms. By far the most common, and promising technologies are physical devices which help monitor your physical health, as well as various machine learning algorithms.
While each company innovating in this field takes a different approach, the underlying idea is to use the vast quantities of digital data to train machine learning algorithms to asses an individual’s general sense of wellbeing, and to make suggestions on how this can be improved upon. For example, US-based company many online counseling platforms use machine learning algorithms to develop a psychotherapy system that is able to help many individuals who lack access, or the financial means to a personal therapist. Another example is Generation Mobility, an organization based in Norway and the USA, which uses innovative machine learning techniques to predict the wellbeing impact that relocating abroad might have on an employee.
How important is employee wellbeing?
While this focus on wellbeing can partially be explained by a culture shift, in which people’s wellbeing is generally more valued and taken into account, it doesn’t provide the full picture. While it has been known for a long time that higher employee wellbeing correlates with lower healthcare expenditures, new research has revealed other ways in which employee wellbeing impacts an employer’s expenses, underlining just how crucial employee wellbeing actually is.
1. Higher employee wellbeing results in lower healthcare costs for the employer. This is because happier employees generally take better physical care of themselves — they exercise more, eat healthier, and take fewer sick days than their less happy peers.
2. Higher employee wellbeing results in a lower employee turnover. This means that employees who report a higher level of wellbeing generally tend to stay with their employers for longer than those who report lower levels. Employee turnover is a commonly underestimated financial burden on a business, thus lowering it is a top priority for many companies. One way to do this is by improving employee wellbeing.
3. Employees who report a higher sense of wellbeing generally outperform their peers who don’t by a significant margin. More productive employees in turn have many benefits for a business, from higher profit margins to increased customer satisfaction rates.
The future of Health- Tech
Given the large number of benefits that a focus on employee wellbeing can have for a business, it becomes apparent why this is such a fast-growing field. Not only are there huge financial incentives for businesses here, but also a potential to improve people’s individual wellbeing, irrespective of their workplace. Therefore, it is safe to assume that this is only the beginning, and that Health — Tech will grow significantly in the years to come for a number of reasons.
Primarily, machine learning techniques are only becoming more sophisticated as time goes on, while we generate ever larger amounts of data for these algorithms to shift through, and learn from. This will improve overall access to health-tech, as well as the reliability and accuracy of its results making them ever most useful, and perhaps even essential at some point in the future.
The advent of health-tech, coupled with bureaucratic, expensive, and often inefficient healthcare systems found around the world will likely transform the healthcare sector and make it more tailored to the needs of individuals. The lines between the health, and wellbeing sectors are likely to continue blurring, as the relationship between these two fields is better understood and technology allows us to focus on individual’s overall health, rather than just specific aspects thereof.
Finally, we can expect to see many new start-ups emerging in this sector that will innovate in ways we can’t begin to imagine. Fact is that there is a huge financial incentive to improve employee wellbeing, while continuing to explore all the factors that can affect it. While that alone would already be enough, it is important to remember that improvements in people’s wellbeing benefit everyone and thus there is a personal incentive for many in this field to make these technologies as accessible, and as widespread as possible.
While there are undoubtedly many challenges still ahead, namely the pushback from those whose jobs are threatened by these emerging technologies, the way that things are currently developing makes it difficult to imagine a future without health and people tech all around us.
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