Can a smartphone save your life? The answer is "Yes" – and it will be more relevant in the coming years as technology companies are in a race to develop solutions that can predict and detect the possibility and level of an illness.
Current available solutions vary from measuring your heart-beat to analyzing stress levels to wirelessly monitor blood pressure to the amount of oxygen intake.
Diabetic patients appear to be the immediate beneficiaries as work is on towards development of various solutions that can help monitor their blood sugar levels.
The latest announcement came from Google when it announced that it was working on a project, testing a smart contact lens that's built to measure glucose levels in tears.
According to the company the prototypes that they are testing uses a tiny wireless chip and miniaturized glucose sensor that are embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material and can generate a reading once per second.
"We're also investigating the potential for this to serve as an early warning for the wearer, so we're exploring integrating tiny LED lights that could light up to indicate that glucose levels have crossed above or below certain thresholds. It's still early days for this technology, but we've completed multiple clinical research studies which are helping to refine our prototype. We hope this could someday lead to a new way for people with diabetes to manage their disease," the note said.
Apple meanwhile is said to be working on multiple solutions that can make the iPhone or the wearable device it is working on equipped to measure ECG, blood pressure, glucose, blood biomarkers, heart rate, fatigue and even your mood.
The iPhone 5s already has seven inbuilt sensors while the Android powered Samsung S4 has nine. Smartphones equipped with greater processing powers have the ability to read data from multiple sensors.
According to reports there are already about 43,000 health related apps listed on the Apple App Store. And with more to come it is just a matter of time before your local clinic will be filled with staff who will be analyzing your mobile data.
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