The Future Of Wearables In Health

Personalized medicine and prevention approaches, aided by new wearable sensing, analytics, language technologies, visualization tools and interface methods, have the potential to transform health from reactive treatments based on deviations from population-level data to one in which interventions and prevention are tailored to individual characteristics. To make this happen will require a range of new fundamental scientific advances across computing, engineering and the behavioral and social sciences in concert with the biomedical research community. These partnerships are needed because the solutions to complex health problems and processes must effectively satisfy a multitude of constraints arising from the sparsity and heterogeneity of data, limitations of current cyber-physical systems, language and cultural factors, network limits, and barriers to patient, provider and caregiver behavioral change. This talk explores the opportunities and challenges in developing a smarter and more connected health ecosystem using wearable technology and highlights promising new areas of research.