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Patients have never had more information about their health, but much of it is unusable. Here's why.
Cardiologist Dr. David Kao is used to patients walking into appointments armed with data from their wearables.
We've been hearing about the "quantified self" for nearly two decades as devices to track our steps have evolved to give us health data that used to require a trip to a clinic and cost thousands of dollars. We explore how that health data actually impacts your life, whether you're walking into your next doctor's appointment or forgetting about the sensor sitting on your wrist.
One Wednesday morning in late May was no different: a patient showed him stats from her smart band that she was worried about.
"Probably 70% of it, I just don't know what to do with clinically, because it's all been made up by the company," said Kao, who is an associate professor of cardiology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. "And then there were like two things that were incredibly useful that we would not have had if she wasn't wearing her [device]."
Scenes like this one have been playing out across the country for more than a decade as patients and doctors struggle to handle the glut of metrics produced by wearable technology.
"You just get this fire hose of all this different kind of information," Kao said. "Usually you have to look up some of it to even have a remote idea of how to comment on it, and there's not a way to digitally summarize or support a clinician in understanding what to do with any of that."