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Your future smartwatch can warn you hours or days before you fall sick

By Cookie Monster - on 14 Jan 2017, 8:45am

Your future smartwatch can warn you hours or days before you fall sick

The Omron Project Zero 2.0 is the first smartwatch in the world capable of measuring blood pressure levels.

While current smartwatches and fitness trackers focus on monitoring your fitness level and activities, future wearables can be used to monitor your health and even warn you when you're going to fall sick. 

Researchers led by Stanford’s Michael Snyder did a two-year experiment on the use of wearables to monitor human physiological changes during various activities and their role in managing health, and diagnosing and analyzing diseases. 

43 participants took part in the experiment where over 250,000 measurements were recorded daily. The data collected actually correlated with real-world events such as travel and sickness. For example, the wearables recorded lower blood oxygen levels during high-altitude flights and this was associated with fatigue.

In another scenario, the wearables were able to identify the onset of Lyme disease and inflammation. The wearables could also reveal physiologically differences between insulin-sensitive and insulin-resistant people, which suggests that they could be used to detect risk for type 2 diabetes. 

Some companies are already venturing into the medical space for wearables. Omron recently showcased a smartwatch prototype at CES 2017 that can measure your blood pressure. Tim Bajarin from TIME believes that Apple is on a mission to improve the overall health of its customers and the healthcare system with its Apple Watch.

Source: PLOS Biology via TechCrunch 

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