Information technology and robotics are reshaping the way we get our health care, in part to meet the needs of an aging population. Faster and smaller devices that are portable and used for individual use are called wearables.
For medicine, that means the possibility of gathering patient information continually that a doctor can then interpret.
Steven Dean is with Phoenix-based ON Semiconductor.
“You know are you trending a certain way, heart rate, blood pressure, blood glucose, are you trending in a way that tells him there’s an issue?” Dean said.
Devices are controlled by low-energy Bluetooth signals from smartphones. Patients can control signal levels while information is saved on smart chips for a doctor’s evaluation.
“And so not only does he get to see a picture much more clearly when he sees you. If he were proactively monitoring that data, he could actually call you for the appointment and say, you know there’s a trend here I don’t like,” Dean said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 80 percent of annual health-care expenses are related to chronic disease care.
