Information From Fitness Tracker Can Improve Personalized Health And Biomedical Research
Wearable sensors are not just helpful for tracking of personal fitness, but can also be employed to get new approaches in different fields of biomedical study. In a study article posted last week in the open access PLOS Biology journal, Weng Khong Lim and associates from the National Heart Centre Singapore and the SingHealth Duke-NUS Institute of Precision Medicine, Singapore displayed that wearables are not only capable of identifying groups of volunteers with same daily activity patterns, but can also forecast different markers of jeopardy for cardiovascular diseases such as high blood pressure, obesity, and high blood sugar.
The take-up and rising availability of low-price user-grade wearables has given a push to substantial interest in examining how these gadgets can augment and enhance healthcare and biomedical research. Responding this query, on the other hand, has proved difficult, mainly due to a shortage of wide-ranging datasets that incorporate wearable data with other types of data.
The scientists selected 233 usual volunteers using various approaches, comprising wearable-supported heart rate and activity monitoring, cardiac imaging, lifestyle questionnaires, profiling of fats in the blood (dubbed as serum lipidomics), and a range of other clinical trials. Remarkably, the team discovered that activity data of wearable might be employed to recognize active people at elevated risk of having inflamed hearts, a situation also dubbed as “Athlete’s heart,” usually thought only to impact spirited athletes. The group also displayed that activity information from wearables can forecast circulating stages of a group of lipids dubbed as ceramides, which have been related with diabetes, obesity, and heart disease.
“An inflamed left ventricle might be posed by harmless adaptation to sustained exercise or heart disease, and these 2 conditions share overlying functions. Activity information from wearables might assist us verify people more probable to have this disorder,” claimed Professor Stuart Cook, senior author, to the media.