On Tuesday, Fitbit Health Solutions and Google Cloud introduced they’re launching a brand new service to assist healthcare and life science organizations make the most of knowledge from wearables.
The corporate stated that Device Connect for Fitbit permits sufferers to make their Fitbit knowledge accessible to suppliers, giving these sufferers management over who they share their info with and for what objective. The instrument additionally features a “knowledge connector,” so knowledge may be built-in with Google Cloud’s BigQuery analytics engine or mapped to rising knowledge requirements. The connector may also make use of the Cloud Healthcare API, making Fitbit info interoperable with scientific knowledge.
The brand new service may even embody an analytics dashboard and might use synthetic intelligence and machine studying. Fitbit and Google Cloud stated the instruments might be used to watch sufferers earlier than and after surgical procedure, take care of persistent situations, handle inhabitants well being, handle well being disparities and gather knowledge for scientific research.
“With this resolution, healthcare organizations might be more and more capable of achieve a extra holistic view of their sufferers exterior of scientific care settings,” Alissa Hsu Lynch, international lead for medtech technique and options at Google Cloud, and Amy McDonough, managing director of Fitbit Well being Options, wrote within the annoucement.
“These insights can improve understanding of affected person behaviors and developments whereas at residence, enabling healthcare and life science organizations to higher assist care groups, researchers and sufferers themselves.”
THE LARGER TREND
Fitbit was officially acquired by Google early final yr after the deal was held up for months by regulatory probes. The corporate recently received FDA clearance for its photoplethysmography atrial fibrillation (AFib) detection algorithm and launched a new line of health and fitness-tracking wearables.
In the meantime, Google is nearing the launch of its own branded smartwatch, known as the Pixel Watch. The tech large stated the brand new wearable will combine Fitbit’s well being and health capabilities.
Remotely monitoring sufferers is a rising pattern inside the healthcare and life science sectors. A recent study revealed in JAMA Inside Medication discovered distant affected person monitoring use amongst Medicare beneficiaries elevated from 91 claims per 100,000 enrollees in February 2020 to 594 claims per 100,000 enrollees in September 2021.
However a review published in JMIR discovered some limitations to elevated adoption. Although health-tracking wearables might encourage behavioral change amongst sufferers and supply extra complete info for suppliers, they would possibly require extra clinician coaching and add to their workloads.
