There are nurses you can see wearing Fitbit or monitoring devices strapped to their arm that measures their walking steps, vital signs like pulse rate, blood pressure as well as monitor their sleep patterns throughout the day. Technology has evolved a completely new world of hands-free computing and wearable technologies like Fitbit Smartwatches and Google Glass, it is becoming more common with doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals.
In not so distant future, your family doctor won’t have to ask how you’re feeling; he’ll already know, because your vital signs will be transmitted automatically. Now there are sensing devices that can be crafted into the fabric or integrated within eyeglasses that allow physicians and surgeons to view important information without taking their eyes off the patient. However, there are more applications of this wearable technology for nurses and other healthcare professionals, let’s see them here.
- Smart watches are facilitating communication and interaction between doctors and nurses as well as other staff through updates, texts and phone calls.
- Nurses can save time in locating the doctors by simply sending a message to their smart watches. For nurses, they can view messages while updating patient records or prescribing medications that eventually results in fewer errors.
- Smart watches frees nurses’ hands thereby helping them in multi-tasking and in spending more face-to-face time with patients.
- Nowadays, patients too are playing an active participation in collecting stats and data, in monitoring their own vitals with the help of wearable devices and then sharing the data to their healthcare providers.
- Surgeons and physicians use Google Glass with apps that record on-going surgeries. Moreover, they are also experimenting it with using amplified reality and voice activation.
- Physicians can scan a barcode using Google Glass to access vital patient information such as – symptoms, health problems, lab results and more, directly into their field of vision.
- By identifying lifestyle trends and routine of a person, wearable technology will help healthcare providers target care to avoid serious and expensive medical conditions such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension.
According to the U.K.-based Juniper Research forecasts – Wearable technology is already having a major impact on healthcare – and it’s expected to do nothing but grow in the coming years. The wearable technology market will grow to $80 billion by 2020, and healthcare will fuel much of that growth.
From paging devices from 1950s to augmented reality in 2015, wearable technology and healthcare are indissolubly linked. The advancements in the field and the future possibilities can only be imagined.
