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The use of wearables in healthcare is still in an infant stage, but research from TrustMarque points towards 81% of respondents wanting more use of connected devices in patient care. 

Benefits of wearables in healthcare are well-documented but include; remote monitoring to allow patients to go home earlier to improve their comfort, reduce the burden on manual hospital checks,...

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Apple, not surprisingly, has attracted plenty of headlines in recent weeks, whether it’s the rollout of Apple Pay, or the diminishing success of the Apple Watch. Indeed, recent figures revealed sales down 90% since the first week’s launch, while analysts at BMO Capital Markets noted they were “disappointed” with sales of the smartwatch and lowered its...

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Prescription-only wearables have the potential to be not merely life-changing, but life-critical to those who need them. Such devices are already known to be especially effective at monitoring chronic conditions such as asthma, diabetes or epilepsy in ‘real time’, sending notifications and alerts every time the wearer enters a ‘danger zone’.

While many of these medical grade wearables start as single purpose devices (such as, for instance, the

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Wearables to assess, advise and improve health and wellbeing has long been one of the key use cases of the technology. Now, here’s a new idea which has come out of Google: a health-tracking wristband which is prescribed to patients or used for clinical trials.

As reported by Bloomberg the device, which is...

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The NHS is unveiling plans to increase Wi-Fi adoption and tentatively examine the usage of wearable devices to monitor patients in hospital.

The proposals, announced following the Personalised Health and Care 2020 blueprint document published last November, mark “a key moment in the journey to making technology work for patients”, according to Britain’s healthcare service.

According to the NHS, the need for more expansive Wi-Fi is an important consideration....

Fitbit retains the number one position in the global wearable device market, but is under stiff competition from Chinese-based firm Xiaomi, according to the latest numbers from IDC.

The figures represent a stark closing in on Fitbit’s market dominance. The San Francisco-based company punts out 34.2% of the 11.4 million wearables shipped in the first quarter of 2015, compared with Xiaomi’s 2.8 million (24.6%).

Xiaomi’s first wearable device was announced in July 2014, which naturally...

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Unless you spent the past month underneath a rock, you have probably heard enough buzz surrounding the Apple Watch’s unveiling to last a lifetime. Apple’s foray into the smart watch space is just the latest indication that the wearables market is forcing its way into the mainstream.

Recent research from Business Insider projects that the number of...

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Wearables are creating an exciting new era for the health industry, with more data about its users available to ensure our bodies remain in peak condition. The problem is that - aside from telling us to get off our rears or letting us know how far we've run - current devices are creating a whole bunch of data but without much context. 

Addapp wants to change this...

Wearables are taking off thanks to how they help to keep a track on our health and can offer small tips and prompts which can make a huge difference to our personal wellbeing. In fact, just yesterday we posted an article about how they are expected to help us predict major disease outbreaks.

Mango Health, which has executives from both the mobile and...

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Long-term readers of my articles will know I'm a fierce critic of Apple, but something happened during their last event and recent discussions at SXSW seem to confirm they’ve changed an industry in a way I don't think the Cupertino-based giant has since the debut of the original iPhone…

When ResearchKit was announced, I was...

The fitness industry is driving wearable adoption, as the success of devices such as Fitbit proves. In fact, on-stage at MWC we heard from Fitbit's Vice President, Gareth Jones, about how their range are breaking into a market which has been reserved to early-adopters through partnerships such as that with WeightWatchers.

So far, these trackers have focused on things like heart rate and perspiration. The most important part of a person's wellbeing, however, is their mental state. No-one wants to...

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Over the past 18 months we have witnessed a sharp rise in the popularity of wearable technology, particularly in fitness and activity trackers. Medical Director of the NHS, Sir Bruce Keogh, recently told The Guardian how such wearables could eventually revolutionise the healthcare industry. With the public fitness habit intensifying and the technology growing more...

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If you’ve got a smartphone and are looking to get fit, looking at the wearable devices on offer, then you might want to hold back on that purchase for now. A new research letter from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) argues smartphones apps are just as effective as wearable devices in tracking step counts.

JAMA’s paper, entitled ‘Accuracy of Smartphone Applications and Wearable...

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Wearable tech and the quantified self clearly provides a huge opportunity for the hardware vendors and digital brands involved; giving them greater insight into the lives, behaviours and tastes of consumers than ever before. But as we learnt in Spiderman, "with great power comes great responsibility" - although a responsibility that I feel many organisations are not taking seriously enough.

Google is currently in the British high court accused of bypassing security settings...

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Our data science intern, Heng Li, obliged our begging and wrote a blog post about what he’s been working on for us this winter. Here is what he told us:

This winter I have the pleasure of working on a data science internship project for Strap along with Qiyao Wang. Simply speaking, the goal of our...

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Health insurance provider, AXA PPP, is hosting their first ever "Health Tech & You" awards at the Design Museum in London and will announce an overall winner during a ceremony on the 18th March 2015. Perhaps predictably, the shortlist is laden with wearable and connected devices which monitor health and performance to usher in a new-generation of patient-led...

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Stop kidding yourself. Simply wearing a fitness tracker for a couple of months was never going to make you reach your health goals. In order for your new gadget to have any meaningful impact on your health, you need to know how to use it as effectively as possible.

1. Establish a Baseline

You might be raring to try out your new toy, but if you want to track your fitness level accurately you’ll need to establish a...

The wearable sector is seeing its growth fuelled by fitness devices which are able to track our location, heart rate, and even specific movements. This of course has led to security and privacy concerns, but what if your device could end up putting you away for some time in the slammer?

It’s not much of a surprise that law enforcement want access to the data from our devices and cloud services as we live increasingly digital lives.

A personal injury lawyer in Canada has used data from a Fitbit smartwatch to...

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A study from Reportlinker on the wearable electronics and semiconductor market has agreed the current state of wearables for enterprise is far stronger than the consumer equivalent.

The report analyses the different industry sectors, market drivers, demographic factors and emerging markets, and notes the difficulty of sizing up a market which is so nascent and contains so many potential offshoots.

For the purposes of the report, Reportlinker classifies a wearable computing device...

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GPS provider Garmin has launched Connect IQ, a platform for developers to build apps which connect with Garmin’s wearable devices.

It’s an interesting move for the firm whose series of wearable devices, outside of fitness trackers, struggles compared to other vendors. As a result, the fact they’re looking for third party developers to beef up their offering is an understandable one.

“As an early mover in the wearables market, we are excited to open up the Garmin...