Making Sense of Sensors | Health & Wellness This Week

This article is part of ParkerWhite’s weekly series, “Health and Wellness This Week,” a roundup of the latest healthcare marketing news and what it means for your marketing strategy.We may not be aware of them, but sensors are integrated everywhere we go. Whether they are on your wrist, in your home, or implemented in your phone, they are constantly collecting data, tracking your daily activities, and will continue to play an important role in all our lives for the years ahead. However, as we implement all of these sensors, it is essential that we are maximizing their potential by understanding the data that is being collected and how we can use it.

This week in health and wellness:

• Google enters the healthcare industry with breakthrough sensor technologies
• Mark Cuban sees our bodies as big math problems as computers become smarter
• iPhones can save us time and money at the doctor’s office

How Does Google Plan to Transform Healthcare?

‍An infographic from HIT Consultant breaks down several of Google’s technologies and the role they will play in transforming the healthcare industry. Whether it is in genomics, cancer research, or smart contact lenses, Google is implementing sensors in all of its future technologies to gather and process essential data to build a smarter and more efficient healthcare system. For example, in its new smart contact lenses, Google is embedding sensors that will track glucose levels of diabetic patients and transmit this data to their mobile device in order to facilitate the monitoring process by patient and physician alike.

‍Marketing Strategy Insights:

• Mobile devices will become an interactive and collective healthcare platform where individuals can access all their health data with the click of a few buttons.
• Memory capacity will continue to evolve in order to maintain the capacity of saving all the data collected by these sensors.
• This commercialization of healthcare will require a secure platform where personal data is protected. This is essential for the success of all these technologies in order to ensure the privacy of the user’s information.

Mark Cuban Talks Healthcare Investing: Soon Our Bodies Will Be Big Math Equations

‍This article from MedCity News discusses billionaire and tech investor, Mark Cuban’s views on upcoming technologies in healthcare. He predicts that sensors and big-data analytics will be “potential game changers in healthcare that will help physicians do a better job of understanding their patients needs beyond the range of a doctor’s experience and the demographic profile patients fit”. He also stresses the importance of continually compiling all this data collected by these sensors in order to analyze and utilize it effectively, or else, it will be useless data that is collected and wasted on a daily basis.

‍Marketing Strategy Insights:

• Powerful data analysis tools are required to aggregate and present all the data captured by these sensors in order to understand and utilize it effectively.
• New businesses will continue to emerge in the mobile health industry and competition will result in more innovative and effective technologies.
• Big-data will play an important role in healthcare as long as this data is customizable for each patient and is interpreted clearly by users.

Your Phone Could Help Lower Medical Bills

‍This article from CNN Money discusses, in detail, how Apple’s HealthKit is expected to eliminate regular doctor’s visits by monitoring, tracking, and reporting the patient’s data through their cellphones, on a daily basis. By downloading specific apps and using the implemented sensors in cell phones, individuals can now track their vitals, including blood pressure, glucose levels and other data without having to visit a doctor. This is a great stepping-stone to the future of mobile healthcare.

‍Marketing Strategy Insights:

• The healthcare industry will become much more interactive. Consumers will be more knowledgeable of their health vitals and will want to have an active role in their health care.
• These remote monitoring technologies will reduces costs for the patient and the physician as it will eliminate the need of unnecessary tests and multiple office visits.
• The surge in these mobile health apps will require much more stringent FDA regulations in order to maintain the level of accuracy and reliability of the data collected.