2017 was a big year for new developments in health technology and consumers should expect to see many more inventions debuting in the coming years. As the modern world shifts towards a total connection between the digital and physical realms, technology companies rush to get a jumpstart on the “smart” healthcare train.
7 Awesome New Healthcare Technologies from 2017
Temperature Tracking Patch
Are you a parent of an infant? Do you know all too well how quickly your precious little angel can turn into an unhappy little devil when you try to measure his or her temperature? They already do not feel well and when you need to stick a cool piece of glass in a place normally reserved for things to come out, they are not happy campers.
TempTraq is a new smart healthcare device that attaches to your baby’s skin like a Band-Aid. The patch monitors your child’s body temperature around the clock and continually sends the information to an application on your smartphone. This allows you to keep track of their temperature without needing to wake them up or disturb them, keeping you calm and giving your baby a chance to rest until they get better.
Health Monitoring Chest Strap
If you suffer from a chronic cardiovascular or respiratory disease, you end up in the doctor’s office or emergency department as often as you do not. QardioCore’s innovative health monitoring chest strap works to help you discreetly keep track of your vital signs and other important health data. It uses built-in sensors to provide clinically accurate data like your skin temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, as well as conducting a continuous ECG.
The device is FDA-approved and made of medical-grade materials. It connects to the free app from Qardio on your smartphone or Apple’s health app for iPad and iPhone. You can even share the data collected with your care provider or other medical professionals.
Mio Slice Advanced Fitness Tracker
The Mio Slice is not your typical fitness tracker. Most trackers only count how many steps you took during a day or how many calories you burned. Mio Slice does all the things a normal fitness tracker does, but adds a new smart feature called the Personal Activity Intelligence (PAI) index.
The Mio Slice tracks how well you sleep as well as calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled, and your heart rate all day long. It then uses this information to create the PAI index, which gives you a customized target score based on your body’s unique response to different physical activities to give you a personalized understanding of your physical fitness.
Smart Glasses for the Blind
Navigating the world as a blind person has always meant relying on another person next to you, a service dog, or a walking stick. Even with this assistance, blind people often do not have complete freedom to go where they want to go, or the ability to know what the world looks around them.
Aira changes that by using smart glasses and augmented reality to connect the person wearing the smart glasses with a professional agent who can view their surroundings through the glasses and help guide them to their destination.
Pregnancy Patch for Contractions
Not sure if those contractions are Braxton Hicks or the real deal? The new Bloomlife pregnancy patch takes the guesswork out of contractions and keeps you and your partner calm and a little less stressed. The device comes as a patch that sticks to your pregnant belly and measures the electrical activity of your uterine muscle. It then sends this info to an app on your smartphone that helps you interpret the data.
Portable Skin Analyzer
The state of your skin reveals a lot about your overall health, especially the skin on your face. Your skin responds to changes in your external environment, your stress levels, and your mood. Maintaining your skin’s health just got a little easier with the release of S-Skin.
The portable device comes with a microneedle patch that attaches to skin painlessly. It then uses LED light to measure the redness, dryness, hydration, or melanin in your skin. All the info gets sent to the application on your smartphone, so you can track any changes.
Biometric Monitor for Your Ear
Rather than wearing a health tracker on your wrist where it can get in the way, Bodytrak is a new style of biometric monitor that sits in your ear like a Bluetooth headset. The ear provides a safe place to monitor your heart rate, body temperature, cadence of movement, distance, speed, VO2, and more, which it then sends to an app on your smartphone all in real-time. It doubles as a Bluetooth headset, so you can answer phone calls or listen to music as well.