Revolutionizing Healthcare with GenAI-Powered Wearable Technology

Sensors embedded in fitness trackers, digital pills, or digital therapeutics have helped individuals and patients gain more equity in managing their health. Also known as wearable technology, these devices help transform health and chronic disease management into evidence-based science, bringing real-time insights into an individual or patient’s day-to-day behaviors and response to treatment. Not only that, these wearables come with functionalities like fall detection, electrocardiogram, heart rate, and blood oxygen levels, which can also save lives. In May this year, Apple’s iWatch dialed emergency services after a car hit the user, detecting a hard fall and when the user was unresponsive.

Backed by the cloud, the internet of things, and a bit of artificial intelligence (AI) as machine learning (ML), wearable technology has made significant inroads for healthcare providers, payers, patients, and their caretakers. These trackers today can identify early warning signs of potentially life-threatening diseases, such as detecting cardiac arrhythmia or sleep apnea, by simply collating and analyzing data in real time against a user’s historical trends and medical guidelines.

With the advent of Generative AI (GenAI), this technology can further help users control their health, proactively coordinate with healthcare professionals and emergency services during a health crisis and ensure better care outcomes with more on-the-go, personalized analysis of individual statistics.

Here are a few use cases that GenAI can drive in the wearable technology space:

• Remote Monitoring: GenAI can streamline patient outreach with personalized messages to monitor the impact of treatment plans. Biofourmis, a digital therapeutics company, offers a product powered by GenAI that collects real-time physiological data from wearable devices and uses AI algorithms to analyze behavioral anomalies or deviations in health parameters, such as blood glucose levels or blood pressure, in near real time.
• Medication Adherence: With personalized messages/prompts right on personal devices, GenAI can healthcare professionals remind patients to take medication and follow care instructions. AiCure, a healthcare technology company, utilizes GenAI to confirm medication adherence through patients’ smartphones visually. The AI system analyzes facial recognition and motion detection to ensure medication compliance.
• Activity Tracking: Wearables monitor activity levels, providing insights into a patient’s daily routine. MyFitnessPal is a popular health and fitness app that utilizes GenAI to provide personalized nutrition recommendations based on users’ goals, preferences, and dietary habits.
• Chronic Disease Management: Livongo, a digital health company, uses GenAI to support chronic disease management with an AI-powered platform that provides personalized guidance, tracks health metrics, and offers real-time feedback for diabetes and hypertension.
• Stress Management: Woebot is an AI-powered chatbot that provides mental health support. It uses GenAI algorithms to engage in therapeutic conversations and assist users in managing their emotional well-being.
• Virtual Assistants: AI-powered virtual assistants, such as Ada Health’s “Ada,” provide natural language conversations with patients for symptom assessments, personalized health information, and guidance through a mobile app.

The Hiccups

Although embedding GenAI in wearable health technology holds immense promise, it also comes with challenges:

• Data Security and Privacy: As more health data is collected through wearables, robust data security and privacy measures become critical. Protecting sensitive health information from breaches and unauthorized access should be a top priority.
• Regulatory Compliance: Medical wearables must adhere to strict regulatory standards to ensure safety and effectiveness. Navigating these regulations can be complex, especially for startups and innovators.
• Integration with Healthcare Systems: To fully realize the potential of wearable health technology, it must seamlessly integrate with healthcare systems and electronic health records. Achieving interoperability remains a significant challenge.

Pave the Way for GenAI in Wearables with Persistent

Persistent offers innovative healthcare solutions using Microsoft Cloud. One of them is Patient Care NXT, which is a co-sell accelerator solution developed by Microsoft. The solution comprises nine key pillars:

• Targeted outreach: Develop marketing journeys for various patient segments and organize omnichannel campaigns leveraging email, SMS, and social channels to engage patients.
• Scheduling appointments and building care plan templates: Enable care navigators to book physical or virtual appointments with a physician on behalf of patients. It will also assist providers in building care plan templates in the system for physicians.
• Patient self-service portal: Access individual care plans and lab reports, schedule appointments with physicians and use Symptom Checker.
• Provider and pharma analytics: Integrated patient information enables healthcare providers and pharma companies to build highly accurate predictive analytics models to enhance drug efficacy, treatment efficacy, and treatment adherence and to deliver patient-centered care.
• Customer Data Platform: Develop a ‘Golden Patient Profile’ by collecting and unifying all its patient data stored in multiple disparate systems and providing more intelligent, actionable, and trusted insights.
• Boosting treatment adherence through gamification: Gamification on the patient self-service portal can improve patients’ treatment adherence.
• Pharmacovigilance: Standardized capture of adverse event data at source, optimizing its quality and providing far more accurate data.
• Decentralized clinical trial solution: Bringing healthcare services directly to patients, decentralized trials offer access to a broader range of patients.
• Ambient clinical intelligence with Nuance DAX: Automatically document patient encounters accurately and efficiently at the point of care. Converts conversations into comprehensive clinical notes.

Wearable health technology is gaining customer-side traction. Chronic diseases require lifelong monitoring and medication; comprehensive disease management solutions can address these challenges. Technology advancements, such as GenAI, will lead to more advanced sensors, AI-driven insights, and user-friendly smart wearables, making them accessible to a broader demographic and improving outcomes across the healthcare lifecycle.

Keep ahead of the curve with Persistent Patient Care NXT. Click here to know more.