This week on HealthConnections, Dr. Carole Myers, a professor emeritus in the University of Tennessee College of Nursing, talks with Dr. Tami Wyatt, the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Nursing and the co-director of the Health Innovation Technology and Simulation Lab, about the advancing technology of medical, wearable devices.
WUOT’s Carole Myers: Wearable devices, devices worn by individuals, can assist with individual health monitoring and diagnosis of problems today. Dr. Tami Wyatt will explore wearable technology and offer guidelines for evaluating wearables just in time for the gift giving season and the start of 2025 Dr Wyatt, what types of wearable sensors are available.
Tami Wyatt: There's tons. What's interesting is that not only are they advancing, they're getting smaller. You can find sensors in clothes. You can find them in wrist bands and watches. There are also some that are available in eyeglasses. And even most impressive is probably the fact that today, what you're seeing is a lot of individuals wearing rings, and these rings have built in sensors in them, so they're getting smaller, and they're actually getting more accurate in their their ability to track
It's exciting now, but I bet there's some things on the horizon. What do you anticipate we'll see next?
Oh yeah, now we currently have sensors that track our walking, our steps. That can track our heart rate, can even track our respiratory rate. But I think what we're going to see in the future, I know, is the ability to track our cortisol levels, stress levels through sweat, that will also be a way that we can track medication adherence, so that we can adjust medications accordingly based on the levels of the medication that you find in sweat. We also have new sensors that are coming out there in clothes. Those can also monitor sweat, but they'll still be able to monitor other electrolytes in our bodies. That's really helpful if you're doing a serious tracking of your health and well being. There are also sensors that are coming out in the near future that have the capacity to smell. We also currently can track even oxygen saturation. But what's going to happen is those sensors are going to just get more and more accurate.
What advice do you have for our listeners for selecting a wearable device?
There's a lot of information available about sensors, and to use a sensor, it always needs to be connected to some type of solution that can display the information that's being collected. That's usually through a mobile health application, either on your phone or on a laptop, on an iPad. But when you're thinking about purchasing sensors for the purpose of tracking, what I would always recommend is that you go first to your provider, the institution where your provider works, or look at your insurance providers to see if they are offering some type of free solution, and the reason to do that is because you can assume that they've been vetted. If you go that route and you're still not finding sensors that meet your needs, then what you want to do is you want to make sure that what you're looking at has been vetted by healthcare professionals. Look for articles, look for testing, look for consumer reviews, and make sure that those consumer reviews are by individuals that have some type of healthcare expertise. And when you're looking for these applications, you also want to make sure that it is going to track the data that you're interested in tracking. Is the data reliable? And really important, is the data secure? How is the information being secured? From the sensor end and from the solutions end, you want to make sure that the device is integrating well with any of the other devices that you use. For simplicity's sake. Also, you want to make sure that any sensor that you're interested in and purchasing or using fits your lifestyle. But most importantly, if the device has a FDA seal of approval, what that means is it meets the criteria of a medical device, and you can safely assume that if the FDA has approved it, then it is a good device. But just because it doesn't have an FDA approval does not mean that it's not a good product.
This transcript has been lightly edited for content.