Personalized Medicine in the Wearable Era: Translational Barriers and Call to Action

Abstract

Preventive medicine is heading towards a more personalized future; adjusting care based on the individual needs of the patient. This future is enabled by wearable devices: not just smartwatches, but devices embedded in clothing, necklaces, and other gadgets that will one day invisibly, continuously, and effortlessly monitor and understand the health and wellbeing of a patient in perpetuity. However, this future is not yet translating from engineering to medicine, because of a tendency to treat patients as a monolithic group, and the lack of willpower to study users in the wild. These failures cause us to miss interesting behaviors and features of patients who have unique personalities, habits, medical histories, and medical needs, potentially hurting their quality of care. We believe that the technology is available to make personalized, specialized health platforms keyed to a single person’s habits, needs, and identity that is both easy to wear and fully functional. In this vision paper, we discuss a new approach to preventive, personal medicine with wearables, and outline confounding factors and applications in line with our vision.

Publication
1st ACM Workshop on Human-centered Sensing, Networking, and Systems
Date
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