Atmosic Technologies Electronics Design Industry Predictions

The Rise of Wearables for Health and Safety Applications

David Su, CEO, Atmosic Technologies

As businesses and venues have looked to re-open amidst the COVID-19 crisis, there has been a growing market demand for contact tracing devices and exposure notification systems. While smartphone manufacturers started to integrate contact tracing software and applications into their devices early on in the pandemic, the ongoing challenge of smartphone access, cost and connectivity remained. Some organizations and countries have turned to wearables for an efficient contact tracing system that is both low cost and easy to manage.

Wearables provide a solution for users to stay informed about potential exposure to the virus while addressing the cost and access challenges. Wearables also can track other types of valuable information, such as temperature. This is incredibly valuable for managed environments such as factories, warehouses, theme parks, entertainment venues, etc. If an individual’s temperature goes beyond a certain threshold, their company could suggest that they go to an onsite health clinic for further evaluation. Wearables can also be designed to withstand certain conditions, like high temperatures, and be tamper and tear resistant for continuous wear. Additionally, as global travel starts to increase, visitors entering a country could be required to be monitored in order to reduce exposure.

Another industry where wearables have increased in popularity is the healthcare industry, where wearables and other connected devices are being used for a variety of medical applications. Wearable medical devices have given patients and the medical staff taking care of them an easy way to monitor their vitals and detect issues before they become serious problems. One emerging use case for wearable medical devices is continuous glucose monitoring (CGM), a relatively pain-free way to track the real-time effects of food and exercise on one’s blood glucose levels.

Both of these use cases can be taken to the next level of efficiency by incorporating additional sensors as well as adding some energy harvesting techniques. Various forms of energy harvesting techniques –especially photovoltaic – that have the ability to harvest indoor light sources could extend a device’s battery life considerably. Energy harvesting is an ideal solution for contact tracing wearables since energy harvesting can enable batteries to last the entire lifetime of a device, making it easier and cheaper to manage fleets of these devices. Also consider how an energy harvesting solution can give healthcare wearables extended battery life and unlock the possibility of remote monitoring, which can be especially helpful for doctors to monitor their patients, or parents to monitor their children, anytime, anywhere via a browser or smartphone application.

This year, we will see wearables used to reduce the spread of COVID-19 along with increased adoption in healthcare for vitals monitoring, both in hospital and at home. It will be exciting to see what innovative new applications wearables will be used for next to help keep people safe and healthy.

Tags: Predictions

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2021 at 1:41 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.