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Should we all be asking for health trackers for Christmas? Personalised healthcare is the newest trend on the health block and for good reason. When it comes to health, wellness, and nutrition, our needs are as individual as our fingerprints. So it’s no surprise that health wearables are a huge and rapidly evolving business. From heart rate monitors, smart watches, tracker rings, and even continuous glucose monitors it seems as though the options are endless, but are they worth your time and money? Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons. Pros: Fitness Tracking and Motivation Health wearables excel in encouraging physical activity by providing real-time feedback on steps taken, time spent in each exercise or heart rate zone, and various other exercise metrics. The gamification elements, such as setting and achieving goals, increase motivation for maintaining an active lifestyle. They generate a wealth of data that can offer valuable insights into our health trends, meaning users can identify patterns, set realistic health goals, and make informed decisions about lifestyle changes based on personalised analytics Health Monitoring and Early Detection Many wearables offer continuous health monitoring, including heart rate, heart rate variability (a measure of stress and recovery), sleep patterns, and stress levels. This allows users to detect irregularities early on, facilitating proactive health management and potentially preventing certain conditions.
Advanced health wearables can be linked in to various software platforms used by healthcare professionals and used to better tailor any health interventions. Through having access to wearable data when working with athletes I am better able to see when their recovery is poor, when we need to add more carbohydrates into training sessions, and even predict when they’re about to be poorly so they can back off their training schedules slightly! Convenience and Accessibility Wearables provide a convenient and accessible means of monitoring health parameters without the need for frequent visits to healthcare facilities. This accessibility is especially beneficial for people with chronic conditions who would otherwise need continuous monitoring. Cons: Accuracy and Reliability Arguably the biggest drawback of health wearables is their accuracy. We can’t make the right healthcare decisions if the data we’re basing those decisions on is wrong. The accuracy of health wearables varies massively, with different brands excelling in slightly different areas. Each brand has its own, very closely guarded, algorithms for working out secondary data (such as sleep patterns) from the primary data (the metrics they can measure, usually heart rate and variability, combined with activity from GPS data). For quite a few of my athletes, their resting heart rates were so low when they were sitting on the sofa that their smartwatches thought they were asleep, so any data about their sleeping times was
| AUGUST 2021 • HOLA SOBER |
HOLA SOBER | MADRID
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