The last several years have brought us closer to being able to gather many types of health data through the many wearables used by 45 percent of individuals in the US and Europe today. More recent advancements now mean that these devices – originally called “fitness watches” – are only partly about actual fitness.
Modern wearable devices offer individuals daily feedback on health metrics as diverse as sleep quality, autonomic nervous system balance, and the distance traveled or calories burned on a cycling trip. The opportunities to use wearables for expanding health beyond fitness tracking are increasing at a rapid pace.
The use of wearables is increasing among users of all ages and fitness levels, particularly as users have begun to recognize their value in providing key feedback toward improving personal health. Most devices involve highly affordable sensor technology, often worn on the wrist and collected on smartphones. Graphs and other historical data can track progress toward enhanced wellness over time.
Moving Beyond the Individual and their Own Data
The drawback of using wearables is far less about the existing technology and more about users being unable to interpret what they are seeing. Those who do understand how the data applies to their own health have few, if any, means to share this information with their healthcare provider or with others who might find it meaningful for research or public health policymaking.
We can think about the global digital ecosystem as being populated with siloed health metrics that may or may not even benefit the person gathering it as long as the ecosystem maintains the status quo. An ideal future scenario making the most of this siloed information must involve the ability to provide these health metrics anonymously and securely to the organizations, researchers, and policymakers who need them but also an incentive for the data creator to do so.
The key features of such a scenario combine to make the individual’s health metrics more useful to the global digital health ecosystem:
- The information needs to be effortless for the individual to gather.
- The device or devices must provide meaningful information.
- The scenario shouldn’t involve proprietary data collection and retrieval methods.
- The data consumers must have access to searchable metadata most useful to them.
- Trust in the data integrity and data provider anonymity must be a foregone conclusion.
- The data creator (with his or her own wearable) needs the incentive to share their health metrics.
How Will this Digital Health Data Ecosystem Function?
The use of digital wearables is thriving; its further use by larger swaths of the population is likely to expand. Data encryption in ways that securely pass sensitive health information, particularly entirely anonymously and in the anticipated volumes, is relatively new by comparison. This is where blockchain encryption enters the picture.
Blockchain encryption offers the optimum combination of decentralization, anonymity, security, and capacity to make it an excellent vehicle for moving meaningful data in this “future” digital health data ecosystem. When combined with a personal wallet, incentives are built into passing invaluable data – likely for the advancements in global health – to data consumers needing larger numbers of individual data creators to have the most meaningful conclusions drawn from the research.
Brainstem Digital Health and Its Role in Benefitting the Global Health Data Ecosystem
Brainstem Digital Health has conceptualized this theoretical “future” scenario and is already part of its core infrastructure. With a device of its own that collects crucial information on sleep, heart rate variability (HRV), and other health metrics, it is user-ready for its technology to meet a real-world situation, where the data can be securely encrypted and passed using one-to-one or one-to-many channels.
The wearer of Brainstem’s device has access to their health metrics daily and can improve their health and wellness through daily tracking and interventions to enhance wellness, including breathing and HRV-based biofeedback tools and other feedback used to direct health goals.
Brainstem Digital Health has gone further by recognizing that similar data can be collected from other types of devices to further expand the ecosystem. This information can be funneled into a robust blockchain digital health supply chain connecting data creators and data consumers.
Brainstem recognizes that a solid infrastructure is essential to expanding what would otherwise be lost or maintained as siloed health information to become valuable streams of securely transmitted data from creators to consumers who can use it for health advancement – all while the data itself remains firmly in the hands of the person who unobtrusively gathered it on their home wearable.
