Smartphone Health Tracking: The Potential for Health and Wellbeing
To make continuous health monitoring a reality involves enormous scientific, technological, and cultural challenges. However, it has immense potential to enhance our health and wellness. And to accomplish those challenges requires producing affordable and easy-to-use healthcare solutions.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms applied in medical and public health provide the means to solve the technological challenge. With AI, it is possible to establish the diagnosis, facilitate decision-making and monitor health.
Researchers have pondered on a few questions, like what if we have a device with us at all times that helps us know about our health status? The idea is to embed this device with sensors. In other words, to have with us, at all times, technologies that can capture and identify changes in the environment, position, or motion.
Now, what if you already have this device and it is your smartphone? Half of the world’s population owns a smartphone. The younger generation right now has grown up with technology, where they would rather Facetime a doctor than visit the doctor’s office.
Some solutions in healthcare right now include telemedicine, electronic health records, wearable, implantable, injectable, and ingestible digital medical devices, and mobile health apps. Smartphone health tracking is applied by most people today in at least one or all the following ways;
- Step counting and tracking
- Covid 19 trackers such as CovidWatch
- Medication or vitamins reminder
- Schedule workouts or fitness reminder
- Alarm clock/timer
- Track pain levels, migraines, medications, and treatments along with outcomes using an app like PatientsLikeMe
- Temperature using apps like Kinsa
- For calorie counts
- Cough tracking
Hyfe is trying to transform all our smartphones into something akin to the tricorders in Star Trek. Since cell phones are an extension of human beings; Hyfe envisions a smartphone as a better extension of human beings, because their app takes advantage of its technological potential.
The Potential of a smartphone in cough tracking
Smartphone health tracking has the potential to transform and revolutionize healthcare. Recent research shows that continuous monitoring can reduce the impact of most of these diseases. In other words, continuous monitoring facilitates proper management.
Imagine an AI-driven device, multi-sensory, carried in billions of pockets and purses worldwide. One study goes as far as to say: “it’s like having a physician in your pocket!” Imagine if we could use such devices to enhance individual and public health and prevent pandemics. Such a reality would mean that:
Using an app such as Hyfe will enable accurate data acquisition. Contrast this with having patients repeatedly count the times they cough, which could be time-consuming, repetitive, and inaccurate.
Medical facilities can access quality diagnostics, especially now, during this pandemic. It has become tough to know if you just have flu, the common cold, a sore throat, or Covid-19. The symptoms are all coughs and more coughs, apparently indistinct to the human ear and perception. And this is true even for a trained healthcare professional.
Medical practitioners can have direct first-hand information about their patient’s health since it will be a recorded context in real-time. So professionals will have more precise information to give a better and more accurate diagnosis.
Patients and their physicians can maintain consistent contact through virtual consultations, rather than relying on in-person appointments, limiting the spread of contagious diseases such as Covid 19.
Patterns of an outbreak can easily be detected by healthcare professionals when gauged with data. So, this data can help create an emergency response plan. And, above all, to be instrumentalized in managing a pandemic and preventing loss of lives.
Many health practitioners can attest that offering care via telehealth has been crucial during the pandemic, and often advantageous. This telehealth mainly consists of real-time visits through a smartphone, tablet, or computer with audio and video.
In the United States alone, almost $250 million is spent on cough drops each year. As such cough is a potentially important factor to figure as a primary endpoint in clinical trials.
Research proves the benefits of using AI-powered smartphones and capabilities for continuous real-time monitoring of patients and disease progression
What if an app like Hyfe had a choice to donate its data to public health databases?
Don’t you think it will facilitate scientific progress towards improving the capabilities of such handheld/pocket devices?
