The link between our data and the medicine of the future

To aggregate information from an ever-growing variety of devices, apps capable of processing this data and giving value will be essential

Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash In the last decade, the healthcare sector is witnessing a proliferation uncontrolled medical data generated by patients - and beyond. Digitization and increasingly advanced assistance services give life to quantities of information that it was not possible to imagine or store only at the turn of the millennium; more recently, the advent of wearables has given a further, colossal acceleration to the same impulse, with devices on the wrists or in the pockets of tens of millions of people generating information at a continuous rate.

In particular, it is estimated that one in five US citizens now use a smartwatch or a fitness tracker, and that in 2020 alone 153 million wearables were marketed worldwide - up 27 percent compared to the 'last year. These gadgets track steps, sleep quality, heart rate and other myriads of information, which add to what smartphones are already capable of with their sensors and usage statistics. All this information represents an ocean of potential, which currently risks getting stuck in the computer systems of local healthcare providers or in a sterile clash between tech superpowers.

The silos of hospitals and Silicon Valley

It is no mystery that all the tech giants currently in business are looking for a way to enter the healthcare sector, and that to do so they have chosen to switch on the way to wearable devices. Apple with the Apple Watch, Google with Fitbit, Amazon with Halo Band, Microsoft with the now defunct Microsoft Band - and then Xiaomi, Huawei, Samsung; all these companies have something in common: through their wearables they collect precious data and transform it in their own way into useful tips to improve the well-being of users.

These data, along with those generated from electronic health records and other points of contact with users and patients, are currently struggling to get out of their reference ecosystems: device manufacturers use them as an incentive to prevent users buy incompatible devices, while health facilities lock them up within their IT systems.

What are Bees

In the future the situation can only get worse, especially from the point of view of the fragmentation of the wearables market - increasingly cheaper but produced by more and more companies. For these reasons, APIs, or application programming interfaces, will be essential to aggregate information from an ever-growing variety of devices.

These software can be considered as the link between the data collected by wearable devices or hospitals, and potential new apps and services created by startups and companies wishing to market innovative digital health solutions. The target audience for Api are precisely these subjects, who aim to offer intelligent analysis services of data generated by patients but do not have the financial resources or programming knowledge necessary to interface the apps they have in mind with the all the devices on the market.

A key role

It is not excluded that in the future the data generated by patients through wearable devices and other collection points will remain free from restrictions of use: the laws of various countries are already moving in this sense, thus pushing for the subjects active in the health sector to compile and process the data generated by their products and services according to the principles of interoperability. Even then, however, obtaining this information from an ever-increasing number of sources will not be a task for everyone.

The APIs and companies that develop these software will give developers and startups of all sizes and backgrounds the opportunity to participate in the market for services related to digital health, without the need for superfluous and unrelated technical skills from the area they wish to revolutionize. They will lower the entry requirements in one of the most promising sectors of the decade; they will keep competition alive which in turn will accelerate progress in an industry that - and is becoming increasingly clear - will change everyone's life. However, it is essential to consider that the data coming from wearables are not always reliable, it is necessary to provide certification standards that guarantee safety and standard levels for everyone. In fact, more generally, the data collected are not uniform because they come from very different devices. In fact, the starting point for thinking about shared data systems is precisely interoperability and the standard certification of data quality.


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Topics

Big data Personalized medicine Health Wearable globalData.fldTopic = "Big data, Personalized medicine , Health, Wearable "

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