My name is Henrik, 31 year old male from Norway - I have a bachelors degree in Physical Activity and Nutrition, now doing a Masters in Clinical Healthwork: Digitalisation and Innovation of Health- and Welfare Services.
I am very much interested in preventive healthcare, and want to contribute to the shift of focus from treating illnesses to preventing them from occuring.
I see huge potential in smart watches, their compatible apps the establishment of safe and effective ways to share data and the cooperation between developers and actors within the health- and welfare services.
My first task will at hand be investigating some existing litterature, and to raise critical questions around how these watches and the technology behind them can be used in health prevention, aswell as critical questions regarding how it is used or can be used by health- and welfare services.
Further down the line, I want to investigate how to implement such technology as a tool for preventive healthcare in health- and welfare services, how the technology can contribute to public self empowerment, health competence, how it can be improved to fit better with needs, ethical issues and privacy and how this type of technology, in cooperation with government measures and regulations can decrease development of chronic disease aswell as how the data can be used for monitoring and developing targeted measures in local communities.
If anyone finds this interesting, and can point me in some directions especially regarding my frist task as for now it would be much appreciated!
I see huge potential in smart watches, their compatible apps the establishment of safe and effective ways to share data and the cooperation between developers and actors within the health- and welfare services.
That’s great to hear! I help market a mobile app that specifically addresses this called “Best Life.” It pulls in data from smart trackers, let’s users track symptoms, medications, weather/air/pollen, and other variables, then plot data on graphs to see what variables impact one another. We are working on trend analysis features that can pinpoint correlations for users without them having to spot things themselves, too.
There are plenty of existing studies linking changes in resting heart rate (easily tracked by a smart tracker/watch) to chronic illness like cancer. The US-based nonprofit I work for was founded by someone who saw in his mother’s data that something was wrong, but her data was not taken seriously by physicians and her cancer was diagnosed too late to prevent early death.
Having spent years in this space trying to educate general audiences about the importance of this data, i think there are two primary obstacles: general audiences are difficult to teach if they are not inherently interested, and physicians are disinterested if they are too busy/overwhelmed in their current environment.
We found the best way to tackle these in our space as a nonprofit is to push people to advocate for themselves more strongly using their data from smart trackers. We really don’t know how to get physicians and healthcare providers to care more; I’m glad to see a new graduate taking an interest in it and hope that means change is on its way!
You may find helpful studies on Google Scholar by searching for related topics. Here are a few I’ve pulled to write about over the years.
Best of luck! I think you’ll find a lot of like-minded people in the Quantified Self space, but you may want to approach health and data focused nonprofits if you want a long-term collaboration. It’s not a bad thing, but many QS folks are doing deep dives on their own data – not necessarily looking to build products and establish best practices that serve larger populations.