The healthcare industry is transforming into a world in which patients take control. By taking its own data and collecting all sorts of new data through the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT). With GDPR, Europeans can request their records from medical institutions and store it locally (Savarese, 2019). IoT allows all sorts of new devices to collect data about your health, from sensors that measure heart rates to complex sensors for an electrocardiogram. And new possibilities are coming to the market every day. With all this accumulated data, patients can create their own digital health portfolio, a digital place were all health-related information is stored. A digital health portfolio has many advantages over the current practice, for one, people get a better insight into their own health status. They can continuously check their status, easily share it with their doctor and compare data with others or with the past. Moreover, this portfolio can be accessed anywhere and anytime, so previous struggles in foreign countries with a foreign language can be minimized – it would help if information management is standardized. Apple.inc is investing a great sum of money in this new model, the Apple health app lets users store and manage health-related data (Farr, 2019). Moreover, the app gives valuable insight, by alerting when someone’s heart rate is too high, or even notify the user if the music is too loud. Nowadays, mostly athletes and tech-geeks track their health status, however, in the future, this might become the standard. And the more apps like these are being used, the better it will be able to perform because of AI, and especially machine learning. The possibilities of AI with the health data are ground-breaking, sickness can be predicted and therefore prevented. Furthermore, AI will be able to personalize healthcare, so that every person will get its own treatment plan, suited just for them.
Savarese, C. (2019). GDPR One Year Later: How To Navigate The Data Collection Minefield. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2019/06/07/gdpr-one-year-later-how-to-navigate-the-data-collection-minefield/#1f81ea454475
Farr, C. (2019). Health care is one of Apple’s most lucrative opportunities: Morgan Stanley. CNBC. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/apple-could-top-300-billion-in-sales-from-health-care-morgan-stanley.html
Hi Bram, the fact that Apple can alarm you when your heart rate is irregular, according to doctors it does that at quite a low failure rate, is, in my opinion, a quite nice innovation . That way it would especially be useful for older people and they wouldn’t feel “too old” wearing this sporty, cool watch – and it even has a fall detection. It is super interesting to see Apple stepping into the healthcare sector, and according to the Verge they even partnered up with insurance companies. These insurance companies then give people discount for buying an Apple Watch. This move has probably quite an impact on firms such as Fitbit which cannot offer as many features as Apple. It will be interesting to see Apple’s future investments in this industry.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/8/20904804/apple-watch-medicare-insurance-discounts-devoted-health
here is the link, in case you want to look into it.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-fitbit-health/fitbit-in-healthcare-partnership-to-take-on-apple-watch-idUSKBN1WW263
I also found this article, stating that Fitbit is apparently trying to catch up and working on a feature similar to Apple’s heart rate function. Additionally, it partnered up with Singapore’s government to support its health program with fitbit devices.