Late last night I was fortunate enough to come across an article entitled “Embedded Health: Designing Future Health Interventions Around Our Weaknesses“. This article begins:
Once we understand the points at which the human brain makes bad decisions that affect our health, we can begin to find ways to influence us to not make those decisions at all. It’s a lot cheaper than a visit to the ER.
I’ve written on the topic of gamification in healthcare many times, and we recently published a white paper on the topic. Gamification is the use of game mechanics to help patients become more involved in their care and form better health habits over time. The concept of Embedded Health takes this a giant leap forward.
Using Embedded Health, new prototype smart phones, and other innovations that are entering the market, would actually tell us about our current state of health. Data such as the speed at which we are typing, the number of typos we create, etc., can be interpretted by the phone to provide a pretty good diagnosis of our current mental state. Taking this a step further, last October at the Connected Health Conference in Boston we were introduced to technology that uses a phone’s video capabilities to read vital signs, such as heart rate and breathing patterns. We were also introduced to technology that read vitals from the hands to give moment-by-moment signals into the physical state of individuals that are unable to communicate their feelings otherwise, such as those with Autism.
The most amazing thing about Embedded Health technology its the preventative solution it provides. Not only can these technologies determine whether or not we are too angry to send an IM to our boss, but this moment-to-moment data could provide clinicians with the ability to respond to emergency situations that we may not even know we are currently experiencing.
Does this topic blow your mind as much as it does mine? What are your thoughts on Embedded Health?
