fall prevention, fall detection

PERS devices and wearables – what will bring them together? Now that the Washington Post has declared that Apple and Google will solve our health problems, aren’t you relieved? Oh, you’re a bit concerned about your privacy, the fact that all of your outside-of-Facebook web searches are by default accessible to Facebook – that you have to opt out on a completely separate website in order to terminate tracking of this activity?  As you wander around Google, Yahoo or through iTunes, your searches about health topics, those are all now relevant for advertisers as provided by Facebook!  And extra-special, what do you think about the fact that Apple lobbied away any need for FDA approval for anything health-related? Feeling safely healthy now?

First the good news -- life expectancy is up.  So as boomers cross the 65-year-marker at 8000 per day, 10,000 per day, or whatever, they just received some good news, for a change, from the CDC.  Life expectancy has inched up. A woman who is 65 today can expect to live an average of 21 more years (to age 86), and a man at 65 has an average life expectancy of 18 more years (to age 83). Note that these are averages and that the averages include those with chronic diseases. That average includes the nearly 26% likelihood of diabetes (diagnosed and undiagnosed) -- and that diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in the US  and that heart disease is the number one cause of death among women and ditto for men.  Thus life expectancy outside of those conditions is most certainly far longer.

Some cool tech enters the market. Consider the Apple introduction of the HealthKit (for the health care industry) and the smartwatch which joins the Pebble (which helped fuel interest in smartwatches) and Samsung smartwatches.  Intel found smartwatches intriguing enough to sponsor a clinical trial in conjunction with Parkinson's disease.  Why? Smartwatches (and smartphones) contain accelerometers that enable the device to determine sudden motion -- like detecting a fall, gyroscope and compass to detect whether you're on of the 61 million people out there running.  And they are able to determine location by enabling GPS position of the device. These devices have geofencing capability -- used in Apple devices for setting up a Location Reminder when you arrive at or leave a location (don't forget to do such-and-so errand).