Adriana, a 60-year-old single woman, has been suffering from breast cancer for the past two years. Recently, she has had a period of pleural effusion (build-up of excess fluid between the layers of the pleura outside the lungs) in her chest. Terrified, she returned home from a dinner party with her friends, entered the bedroom, turned on the computer, and opened the MEDIST app. Now, ADRIANA takes off her clothes, puts on a thin medical vest and, a pair of smart socks, then pushes on the ON button. The application immediately detects the devices, updates the data, and sends it to the MEDIST software.
Charts of Electrocardiogram (ECG), arterial pulse, arterial blood oxygen level, heart rate, respiration rate, and blood pressure immediately appear on the screen. The heart and respiratory sounds are received as DATA and compared with the patient’s history and the natural sounds of these organs. A warning shows up due to a reduction of the sound in the right half of Adriana’s chest and the possibility of fluid. The application automatically sends an emergency message to Adriana’s FAMILY physician and Adriana’s daughter.
The information received from the socks does not record a significant difference in size or temperature between the limbs.
You might think this is part of a science fiction story. But, considering the fast growth in healthcare wearable devices and AI software, as well as the new online communication methods and virtual reality, soon, this story will be a part of the real-life of many people. And as a result, the health management systems will change too.
Up to now, many healthcare wearable devices and gadgets have been designed to assess a patient’s health status and, they’re becoming more and more available every day. These devices measure body fat percentage, muscle percentage, heart rate, ECG, arterial blood oxygen saturation percentage, pressure Blood, and body temperature automatically and without any doctor or healthcare provider presence or intervention.
If you are a doctor, medical student, or interested in medical topics, you will notice a gap; all of the available devices measure vital signs but don’t keep track of them, and don’t perform an automatic medical assessment. Imagine a device that can record the sound of the heart and different parts of the lungs and compare them with standard and normal lung sounds to analyze and diagnose possible disorders. Or it could be a device that can measure jugular vein pressure as an indirect sign of the right heart pressure and at the same time measure the presence of free fluid inside the abdomen.
Many cancer patients are at risk for deep vein thrombosis, and it is possible to have a tool that measures and compares the diameters of both limbs and their temperature daily, allowing vein thrombosis to be diagnosed earlier.
Shortly, healthcare wearable devices will be available more as watches, vests, socks, or belts. They will be able to make assessments and provide this information to a physician to come to a more accurate decision. Also, by using analysis and diagnosis algorithms and software, a simple app on the phone would determine whether a person needs to see a doctor or not.
After the presence of such telemonitoring devices, we can say that telemedicine and telehealthcare have stepped into a new era. This will be a revolutionary start for rapid and accurate communication and virtual healthcare that gradually will form a brand-new healthcare system shape.