A miser pays twice
Digital Medicine: Are consumers ready for mobile checkups and telemedicine?
Medgadgets, Geektimes
In the field of digital medicine, many companies are working to redefine the way consumers interact with the healthcare system. The constant and steady growth in sales of wearable devices makes you wonder – how to apply the data of all sensors, pedometers and heart rate monitors for medical purposes?
The American venture fund RockHealth, which invests in digital medicine projects, decided to conduct a study of consumer acceptance of various categories of digital health. To do this, they interviewed more than 4,000 American adults who represent the entire US population. It turned out that 12% of respondents are ready to use wearable gadgets for health monitoring, 17% are ready to carry out mobile health monitoring. Consumers are still skeptical about telemedicine – only 7% are ready to use it.
The reason for buying gadgets is mainly the desire to be more active and lose weight. However, the hypothesis that wearable gadgets are mainly used by the young, healthy and active can already be refuted. The first buyers and early adopters were indeed generally healthy people, but recently gadgets have been actively used by people with health problems – a third of new wearable device users were hospitalized during the previous year.
What is the use of smart gadgets for health control? Today, almost half of people control weight in their head or on paper, a quarter – pressure, about 15% – sleep. Physical activity is the only parameter that is most actively monitored in mobile applications, probably because many modern smartphones support the pedometer function.
However, the proliferation of fitness trackers should soon increase the percentage of mobile health monitoring, especially parameters such as pulse and sleep.
There are only about 0.5 million users of smart gadgets in Russia, and there are few reviews on their use yet. Researchers from Welltory conducted a survey among people suffering from the most common chronic problems, for whom wearing gadgets (and taking care of a healthy lifestyle in general) is most relevant: suffering from insomnia, chronic stress and headaches. It turned out that people who do not sleep at night are most actively watching all the parameters, and most of all they are interested in monitoring activity – more than half have pedometers. Obviously, people hope that sufficient activity during the day will help them fall asleep at night, which is certainly consistent with science and common sense. But many people who are under chronic stress, paradoxically, do not take good care of their health (although, perhaps, this is the reason for stress?) Almost a third of them do not monitor their weight, pulse, or activity, but a record 18% regularly register their productivity – for example, in applications like RescueTime. Now the Welltory team is recruiting volunteers for a larger study using gadgets and tracking the results.
The problem for gadget manufacturers, as well as paid mobile health monitoring services, remains obvious: most users are not ready to fork out.
At the same time, more than half of the respondents admit their responsibility for health, and a third actively takes care of it. But only 7% are ready to pay out of pocket for health-related goods and services. Although the miser pays twice: which is better – a couple of gadgets for several thousand rubles, gym expenses and a little time to record your indicators or expensive treatment in the future? Gadget manufacturers and popularizers of healthy lifestyle should convey to the consumer: prevention is always better (and cheaper) than treatment.
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18.03.2016