How wearable design can directly affect our health
Jason hadn’t been feeling right for a few weeks. He hadn’t thought much of it. That was until he put on his Apple Watch.
“It said that I was in aFib”.
Jason shrugged it off, assuming it was a false positive or a bug and went into work. The watch kept telling him he was in aFib (atrial fibrillation), but he didn’t take much notice until his coworkers started to comment on how pale he looked.
He headed to the hospital and sure enough, the cardiac team said that he was close to going into cardiac arrest. He was in aFib.
Thankfully Jason survived and in the weeks since, he hadn’t been notified by his watch of any other troubling signs.
Similarly, a teenager with a Samsung smartwatch was alerted to the fact their heart was racing at 219 beats per minute (the normal resting rate is between 60 to 100 BPM). His mother took him to the hospital where he was diagnosed with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome (where an additional electrical pathway exists between the upper and lower chambers of his heart). This diagnosis would’ve been unlikely to happen without the wearable alerting the mother.
These cases aren’t one-offs. There are numerous stories about how health wearables have potentially saved lives by persistent monitoring and prediction of dangerous health conditions.
Our health is of the utmost importance to us and by all accounts, it seems as though wearables are about to become an integral part of the way we monitor it. Not only that, but — if designed right — they may also play a key role in predicting health later in our lives.
Tracking Covid-19
The most pressing health issue the world faces right now is the Covid-19 pandemic. The virus spreads fast when two people come into close contact and can have devastating outcomes.
Technology and software are being designed from a number of different companies and organisations to identify and track the spread of Covid-19.
The key development so far is from Apple and Google, who are working together to implement a contact-tracing system which will allow public health authorities to use native APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to develop downloadable contact-tracing applications. These apps will track who you come into close contact with by exchanging anonymous, unique IDs wirelessly to each other’s devices. If one person is diagnosed with Covid-19, they can trigger the app to alert all people they have come into contact with, so that they should self-isolate.
Healthcare is a basic human right — and it’s one that should be inclusive to all. This sentiment should extend to the health-tech market, where there is likely to be heavy investment and innovation in the coming years.
In addition, numerous researchers and institutions have launched their own Covid-19 tracking applications (e.g. Covid Symptom Study). These apps allow you to share how you are feeling, whether you have been tested for the virus and what precautions you are taking (for example, if you’re wearing a mask or taking a multivitamin supplement).
Software is playing an increasingly vital role in the tracking of this pandemic — and this could be the start of a major shift in personal healthcare, and the way we design for it.
Spotting trends in emerging data
The hidden benefit to our health being tracked over long periods of time is that data begins to pile up. Over time, this data can be used to spot trends in ways that were never before possible.
Not only could our personal devices automatically log symptoms for us (such as an elevated heart rate and a high temperature), but they could also begin to form a timeline of events expected for new and existing health conditions.
For example, if a personal device could recognise that you have been coughing a lot recently and there is a known local outbreak of Covid-19 in your area, your device could make an educated assumption that you may be at risk and should contact a health professional. In addition — if devices could anonymously share that there are people in the same area experiencing the similar symptoms, it could help researchers detect hotspots.
In many health issues, early detection can help increase your chance of a successful recovery. If technology and software can even cut a few days off your detection time by analysing the masses of data you produce every second, it’s an incredibly valuable investment of time and effort.
Issues designers need to solve
Healthcare is a basic human right — and it’s one that should be inclusive to all. This sentiment should extend to the health-tech market, where there is likely to be heavy investment and innovation in the coming years.
However, while there are many great stories of how a smartwatch has saved someone’s life or a new API design might help mitigate the next pandemic, we have to consider a number of different design challenges for health wearables.
Privacy
“The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data,” says The Economist.
It should come as no surprise that data privacy is crucially important when it comes to health technology. We don’t want anyone but our doctors to be reading about our fungal infection or nosebleeds. We also don’t want them knowing what our heart rate was at 7:23 PM on Tuesday.
However, when the time comes, some data must be shared with the correct health authorities. Otherwise, the heroic life-saving tales of the smartwatches could never happen.
Designers need to create solutions that truly obfuscate and protect a person’s data. At the same time, these solutions should maintain a level of easy access where a parent can check their kid’s recent health trends, or the ambulance can be called if someone’s heart rate slows down to a worrying level.
Enough cautionary incidents have already occurred for us to learn that it only takes one poorly planned library integration for your health data to be on the first trip to Facebook. These events damage reputation and lives — and no amount of beautiful aesthetics can overcome poor data storage decisions. As a designer, you should be questioning what data is needed for.
- Are you collecting too much?
- Is the data anonymised?
- How could your design harm, or protect, a future user?
Accessibility
Health wearables — the types of devices most likely to kickstart a revolution in personal health technology — suffer from a number of accessibility issues in terms of their design.
Often, data represented on the screen remains just that. There is no touch or audio feedback provided, and so if you suffer from poor vision you immediately have a pretty big barrier to entry. In addition, the visual data relayed to a person is often on a tiny screen. While nobody wants to carry around a 7-inch screen on their wrist, as designers we need to contemplate alternative usage and interactions to be more inclusive to those with different abilities.
Apps and websites that connect with the medical devices are typically inaccessible, too. So, even if a person wears their device just to collect data and analyse it on a larger screen, often the bigger device fails them by not providing a usable experience through screen readers, or the data being represented is colour with no iconography or written detail — making it impossible for someone who suffers from colour-blindness to interpret.
A nice example of accessibility for wearables can be found on Apple’s or Google’s sites — they showcase how they’ve been able to provide a stellar experience that you’d expect on desktop or mobile, on a watch. To meet broader accessibility guidelines on connected apps and websites, you could refer to WCAG guidelines.
Autonomy
Many wearable devices require an accompanying smartphone. Smartwatches typically cost just as much as the phone — if not more — and this creates a significant barrier-to-entry for a lot of consumers who would want to benefit from monitoring their health, but their economic background is holding them back.
If making the devices cheaper is no option, then the only valuable alteration would be to make the wearable autonomous — meaning it doesn’t need a linked device to connect with. This would likely also open the door for additional functionality such as instant messaging on the wearable, or being able to share health data directly with a specific person, like your doctor.
Longevity
Battery life on wearables is often poor or average. Screens and other health sensors drain the power fast, meaning your device might not even last a full day.
Most people do not have access to a power outlet throughout the day, and so their device often dies, meaning they carry around a useless blank screen on their wrist for the rest of the day or an ECG sensor which is essentially an ugly, uncomfortable belt.
In the case of smartwatches, the short battery life can commonly mean that — rather absurdly — your watch is no longer able to tell the time, which can lead to people missing their meetings or important appointments.
At the very least, perhaps it would be a better idea that when your watch is on critical battery, all functionality other than telling the time is disabled, in order to extend battery life for a few more hours.
Conclusion
As a designer, you may at some point influence the interaction people have with their wearable technology. No matter how large or small that influence may be — you have the power to make a huge difference in someone’s life and their experience when using your product.
While we often think of design as a very visual profession, it influences a lot of the decisions which can make or break a product such as a wearable. For instance, you could influence decisions such as sacrificing a super-high-resolution screen for all-week battery life and some extra health sensors through your part in the project.
If you’re directly working on UX design for health technology, then you are probably in one of the most exciting and impactful industries right now. The amount of data being collected will allow you to spot trends like nobody has seen before, and you can then use that data to help inform design decisions and prioritise functionality.
Health wearables are here to stay, and inevitably will begin to play a more important role in our lives. You have the ability to make them great and help people with different medical afflictions. You might even save someone’s life.
