I’ve written numerous times recently about the potential for the data generated by wearable fitness trackers to not only benefit our fitness levels but also our wider health. It’s increasingly common for the data from these devices to be used in medical research. The potential of this relatively new field was highlighted by a recent paper from SingHealth Duke-NUS Institute of Precision Medicine, Singapore.
The paper highlights how wearable data is not only capable of identifying groups of volunteers by their activity levels, but was also able to predict the risk of various diseases, including high blood pressure and obesity for individuals.
The potential of data generated by wearable devices to be used in medical research has been tantalising for some time, but to date there has not really been significantly large and comprehensive datasets that pair up wearable data with other data types.
The research saw a couple of hundred volunteers monitored using data from wearable devices, lifestyle questionnaires, cardiac imaging, serum lipidomics and various other clinical tests. The analysis revealed that the wearable data was not only able to identify active individuals (as you’d hope!), but also of accurately predicting those people at risk of various conditions, including enlarged hearts. This in itself was valuable as the condition was previously believed to only affect competitive athletes.
The team also showed that wearable data can predict the circulating levels of a particular class of lipids called ceramides. These are commonly associated with a range of conditions, including obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
“An enlarged left ventricle could be caused by heart disease or harmless adaptation to sustained exercise, and these two conditions share overlapping features. Activity data from wearables may help us identify individuals more likely to have this condition due to exercise, and are therefore at risk of misdiagnosis in the clinic,” the researchers explain.
The data revealed that the more active volunteers had considerably lower levels of circulating ceramides. It’s a finding that would traditionally have required expensive experimental studies or clunky questionnaires. The use of wearable data promises a rich dataset from not only a larger sample group, but also a sample group who produce a constant stream of reliable data.
We’re at an early stage of this journey in fully capitalizing on the data possibilities in healthcare, but this work is another example of the potential out there.
