A New Year’s Resolution: Using Broadband to Get Healthy and Stay Well

Recent advances in broadband-enabled sensor technology offer the potential for more convenient, and ultimately less-costly and less-invasive health solutions. It’s worth getting familiar with these technologies and talking with your doctor about how digital health tools can help you.

1. Ingestibles are broadband-enabled digital tools that we actually eat. For example, there are "smart" pills that use wireless technology to help monitor internal reactions to medications. Also, miniature pill-shaped video cameras may one day soon replace colonoscopies or endoscopies. Patients would simply swallow a “pill,” which would collect and transmit images as it makes its way through the digestive system.
2. Wearables are digital tools you can wear, such as wristwatch-like devices that have sensors to monitor your heart rate and other vital signs. Beyond medical monitoring, such wearables may also help improve athletic performance, track fitness goals or help prevent dangerous falls in the elderly. We may soon see widespread use of smart clothing – or smart “tattoo” applications – that use skin-based sensors to measure things like heart rate, respiration and blood pressure.
3. Embeddables are miniature devices that are actually inserted under the skin or deeper into the body. A heart pacemaker is one kind of embeddable device. In the future, embeddables may use nanotechnology and be so tiny that doctors would simply “inject” them into our bodies. Some promising applications in this area could help diabetes patients monitor their blood sugar levels reliably and automatically, without the need to prick their fingers or otherwise draw blood.