This paper categorizes smartwatch applications in healthcare into three domains: monitoring, nudging, and predicting. Each offers distinct health benefits:
- Monitoring captures real-time health metrics (e.g., heart rate, activity levels) and transmits them to healthcare providers, enhancing patient care by allowing continuous oversight even outside clinical settings.
- Nudging encourages users to adopt healthier behaviors, leveraging smartwatches’ ability to deliver reminders and rewards to increase physical activity and mindfulness.
- Predicting uses aggregated smartwatch data to inform AI models, which can help anticipate health outcomes and risks for conditions like cardiovascular issues.
The study emphasizes the potential of smartwatches to reduce healthcare costs and improve outcomes but highlights challenges like data accuracy, privacy concerns, usability, and integration with healthcare records. Regulatory and standardization frameworks are recommended to ensure that smartwatches function as reliable medical devices while addressing data security and ethical use in patient care.