Your smartwatch and fitness tracker are about to get much, much more useful
Wearables are creating so much health, fitness and lifestyle data (around 1m GB per person) that it’ll make your face scrunch up and your brain hurt just thinking about it. Now, IBM is working to give doctors and researchers secure access to that heap of wearable data from smartwatches, fitness trackers and smartphones.
Read this: How to use Apple Health on your phone
The computing giant has just announced Watson Health Cloud, a platform based on the smartypants software that won the quiz show Jeopardy in 2011 and needs some new ammo with which to burn Siri and Cortana.
It means that doctors, researchers and yes, insurers and pharmaceutical companies, can get access to real-time health data, captured from customers of IBM’s partners and shared, we assume after giving their consent. Apple is one of the first on board, having signed up HealthKit, which includes data from the Apple Watch, and ResearchKit for the cloud storage and analytics.
Read this: The best fitness tracker you can buy
Other Watson Health Cloud partners include Medtronic and Johnson & Johnson, both of which make medical devices and health products. The platform is designed to help with both individual care and in the wider treatment of diseases by replacing paper based systems.
There’s not many more details than that at this early stage but it’s a very exciting development on the road towards a cash-saving, time-saving method of remotely monitoring and diagnosing patients.
Apple’s ResearchKit has already rolled out across the US, tackling individual diseases such as Parkinson’s and diabetes by allowing participants to submit data via their iPhones to university and hospital teams.
