Why are doctors wary of wearables?

Wearable tech – currently dominated by smart watches - is a multi-billion dollar industry with a sharp focus on health tracking.

Many premium products claim to accurately track exercise routines, body temperature, heart rate, menstrual cycle and sleep patterns, among others.

In the USA, the Department of Defense issued a $96 million award last week to Finnish health technology company Oura to put its smart rings and services in the hands of service members.

While the department didn’t specify in the award announcement how many rings would be purchased under the firm-fixed-price contract, it explains that the contract will also provide a suite of data analytics services the Pentagon’s health arm can use to take action on the biometric information generated by the devices.

“This contract is to provide the Defense Health Agency (DHA) Wellbeing Office delivery of Ouraring Inc., biometric sensor devices; data analysis including monitoring of physiological stress, recovery, resilience, and wellbeing indicators; individualized biometric data visualization; aggregate wellbeing visualization for the agency; and content delivery of wellness-related insights and training,” the award announcement says.

With those services, Oura will also “deliver workforce wellbeing services including high-performance medicine, mindfulness training, leadership coaching, protective factors, and peer-to-peer support training,” and “provide its wellbeing services at military medical treatment facilities (130 subordinate entities) for delivery to the entire DHA workforce.“

In the UK, Health Secretary Wes Streeting has talked about a proposal to give wearables to millions of NHS patients in England, enabling them to track symptoms such as reactions to cancer treatments, from home.

But many doctors – and tech experts – remain cautious about using health data captured by wearables.

Dr Jake Deutsch, a US-based clinician who also advises Oura, says wearable data enables him to “assess overall health more precisely” – but not all doctors agree that it’s genuinely useful all of the time.

Dr Helen Salisbury is a GP at a busy practice in Oxford. She says not many patients come in brandishing their wearables, but she’s noticed it has increased, and it concerns her.

“I think for the number of times when it’s useful there’s probably more times that it’s not terribly useful, and I worry that we are building a society of hypochondria and over-monitoring of our bodies,” she says.

Dr Salisbury says there can be a large number of reasons why we might temporarily get abnormal data such as an increased heart rate, whether it’s a blip in our bodies or a device malfunction - and many of them do not require further investigation.

“I’m concerned that we will be encouraging people to monitor everything all the time, and see their doctor every time the machine thinks they’re ill, rather than when they think they’re ill.”