COVID-19 Pandemic Impact: Wearable Technology in Healthcare

The COVID-19 crisis has shifted innumerable perceptions regarding daily activities as well as has led to a significant reassessment towards well-being and protection. On the other side, it represents lucrative opportunities to novel healthcare solutions including wearable technology. The pandemic has triggered a fear of infection from not just the virus but other neglected elements that impact health. The adoption of wearables and accompanying apps has escalated significantly as it helps the users to feel aware and protected. Moreover, as normal life is thrown out of control, these wearables restore a sense of control by providing real time information of health signals.

Since the outbreak of the COVID 19, the sales of fitness tracking wearables have increased exponentially. The observation of the benefits of wearable health gadgets is not just limited to users, but health-care providers and payers as well. This growing demand for wearables is expected to persist even after the outbreak is controlled expanding the scope of the market.

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Wearables are body-borne computational and sensory devices which can sense the person who wears them and/or their environment. Wearables can communicate either directly through embedded wireless connectivity or through another device (e.g. a smartphone). The data collected by the wearable device about the user or its environment is processed in a processing unit located locally or in an external server, and the results are ultimately provided to the wearer. Smart wearables may have control, communication, storage and actuation capabilities. The number and variety of wearable electronic devices have increased significantly in the past few years, as they offer significant enhancements to human comfort, health and well-being.

The wearable AI devices market is a promising opportunity for the players to integrate the AI-enabled voice assistant technology in wearable devices. Thus, the market is expected to advance due to the rapid demand for voice assistants in consumer electronics. North America held the largest share in the wearable AI devices market in 2018. The demand for AI-enabled voice assistance is gaining popularity, with voice assistance feature being integrated in them to support multiple functions.

Such technology allows users to search through the web on the device with a voice command, related to the weather, news, reminders, scheduling appointments, making calls, reading messages, and much more. It was mainly due to the strong presence of already established market players, such as Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc., in the region.

The rise in life expectancy over the past decade in developed regions such as North America and Western Europe has resulted in an increase in the aging population. The growth of the elderly population has led to a rise in chronic diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, arthritis, obesity, asthma, and heart diseases. This has resulted in the demand for live and effective monitoring of health conditions and the day-to-day activities of the geriatric population. A rise in demand for real-time healthcare monitoring among healthcare centers has driven the adoption of smart healthcare products. Smart healthcare solutions are offered with embedded communication and sensor technologies along with data analysis techniques to monitor an individual for diagnosis or progress of ongoing treatment of diseases. Thus, the growing demand for remote health monitoring will drive the smart healthcare market growth during the forecast period.

Leading Wearable Sensors Market Firms

Some of the leading market firms outlined in the study include Xsens Technologies, InvenSense, Inc., STMicroelectronics, Google Inc., Wearable Technologies Service GmbH, Rackspace Hosting Inc., to name a few.

Opportunities for wearables

COVID-19 has also presented the challenge of asymptomatic infections. The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine estimates that 5% to 80% of those testing positive for the virus may be asymptomatic. In these cases, symptom-based screening is completely futile and poses the risk of missing out on a significant chunk of this demographic. These carriers pose a public health risk unknowingly.

Hence, healthcare researchers are making efforts to identify minute fluctuations to normal bodily functions indicative of an infection using wearables. This can prove useful in cases where the person does not show any signs of the infection. There are several studies being conducted to explore the potential of different consumer wearables in identifying COVID-19 infections.

Stanford Medicine researchers and their collaborators are aiming for prediction of the onset of the infection through data collected from wearables. The collaborators include the wearable bracelet giant Fitbit whose smartwatches and other wearable devices are providing data for the study. The team is attempting to create an algorithm that will provide alert when the immune system is fighting off an infection. The success of the algorithms will lead to development of devices that will help to curb the spread of the infection and add to the growth of the market. Professor and chair of genetics at the Stanford School of Medicine, Michael Snyder, PhD, have stated the aim of harnessing data from wearables to identify infections potentially before the occurrence of symptoms.

The primary types of wearable sensors include medical-based sensors, motion sensors, position sensors, image sensors, inertial sensors, pressure sensors, and more.

Smart wristwear, smart footwear, smart bodywears, smart glasses, and more are identified as the key application areas for wearable sensors. It is believed that the smart wristwear segment has remained in the lead since 2018, having held the value of USD 436.3 million the same year.

Conclusion

It has been observed historically that new technologies and trends emerge after major incidents such as the two World Wars and the Spanish flu outbreak. The impact of the novel COVID 19 virus is expected to leave a long-lasting impact as well. The outbreak of the COVID 19 virus has led to people grappling with uncertainty around the infection and its treatment. The virus poses risk not just to human life but has caused economic distress and severe emotional strain. This has created a domino effect giving rise to new sets of needs and necessities that were not required earlier. After the pandemic subsides, major transformations are expected in the field of health-care including a general shift towards online services and enhancement of home health-care. The capacity of the healthcare systems globally is suddenly under the pressure of being exhausted as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. Moreover, the market of wearable solutions that measure and monitor the health conditions of chronic, non-coronavirus patients are also expected to witness significant growth as they aid in reducing the overall burden on healthcare providers.