Examining How Wearable Technology is Transforming Healthcare for the Elderly

While wearable technology is mostly marketed to the young and fit to monitor their health and maximize their performance, wearable technology has even more potential to improve healthcare for the elderly. Let’s examine how wearable technology is already transforming healthcare for the elders in our society.

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Monitoring Activity and Reporting Inactivity

Wearable monitors are able to track the actual activity level of the subject. If someone doesn’t move for a certain period of time, the system may notify a monitor to check on the person. The same monitoring of miles walked can track balance problems and report worsening conditions to a health provider. The systems can also track someone’s body temperature and report a combination of decreased activity and increased body temperature that indicate they are very sick. You won’t have to check on Mom every day to see if she’s OK, because you’ll be notified immediately if she isn’t.

Constant and Accurate Monitoring of Health Conditions

While the blood sugar monitoring technology built into contact lenses promises to constantly track one’s health, health monitors can already do this for several conditions. For example, they already track heart rates and blood pressure. The report of a woman whose pregnancy was diagnosed via a heart rate increase on her health monitor was entertaining. For someone with a heart rhythm problem, such monitoring and warnings to either themselves or a healthcare provider is potentially life-saving. Blood pressure monitoring is likewise equally valuable. Wearing the monitoring device allows medical professionals to track someone’s blood pressure throughout the day, not just when the person feels like putting on a blood pressure cuff. It can also document dangerous drops in blood pressure or heart rate when someone is unconscious and not aware of the problem.

Fall Detection

The velocimetry sensors built into your smartphone to know when you’ve tilted it on its side can also be built into health monitors. These sensors can tell the difference between leaning down slowly to pick something up and the faster descent that indicates a fall. These fall detectors when tied to a health monitor can notify someone immediately when it happens and summon help if the subject doesn’t respond that they are OK. This is critical when someone is prone to passing out due to low blood pressure or low blood sugar or at risk of falling in the bathroom or down the stairs, left unconscious and unaided until a caregiver arrives.

Medical alert systems with a GPS component offer the ability to track the user and still summon aid whether they fell on a walk around the block while walking the dog or fell down the stairs to the basement. In either case, systems like this may allow someone to be alone at night or several hours at a time, reducing the cost of in home care and delaying placement in a nursing home.

Wearable technology should provide solutions for many issues that are specific to seniors. Not only will they make monitoring easier, they will also allow caregivers to track someone’s activity and respond quickly to inactivity that suggests illness or injury.