This future trend is based on the current popularity of wearable technology particularly for tracking health and fitness.
The current situation appears to be that many people are wearing a fitness tracker or a smartwatch in order to monitor their activity level, sleep, heart rate, blood pressure, and other factors, and there are many doctors who could gain a better understanding of their patients’ needs through with that data, but there are few connections between them.
IBM has announced that it will be working with several companies in order to change that situation.
In fact, IBM is now entering into deals with Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic, and Apple, in order to make it possible to collect more information from wearable devices such as a smartwatch, and to be able to use it for the clinical care of patents. IBM said that it would be able to use its famous Watson supercomputer in order to launch a complete Watson Health unit. This is only the most recent step taken by IBM in order to grab hold of some of the potential of the Internet of Things by way of vast levels of data processing.
IBM’s Internet of Things business unit is designed for the collection and processing of data from wearable tech like the smartwatch.
That said, the unit can also assist companies in the collection and processing of data from a far broader range of devices, such as other smart gadgets, smart clothing, and many other kinds of technology. Most recently, the company has turned its attention to the applications of Watson for the health care field. This is an area in which a great deal of potential has been seen for quite some time.
According to Watson architect and senior vice president at IBM Research, John Kelley, the health care industry is actually among the most logical applications for the power of the supercomputer. He explained that “The cost of health-care continues to grow,” and that “We need better outcomes — we see a number of diseases that are exploding, from diabetes to cancer.”
By being able to connect the data collected by a patient’s smartwatch, fitness tracker, or other device to his or her physician’s computer, the digital records that are kept about that patient could be considerably enhanced.
