Who Benefits Most from Using Smart Wristbands and Watches?

Every day, on more people’s wrists, we see various sizes, colors and brands of smart activity wristbands and watches . These smart wristbands and watches are popular electronic products that track not only time but also you through their many sensors, allowing you to monitor yourself. For doctors and scientists, smart wristbands have different meanings: monitoring how active their patients are / how much they exercise, measuring how much benefit they gain, and even demonstrating this through scientific studies!

In recent years, the positive effects of physical activity on brain/mental health have been addressed in noteworthy studies . However, for people who have completed cancer treatment and resumed normal life, no study had demonstrated the benefits of exercise for mental health. An important contribution in this area came on September 19, 2017, in Cancer , with the publication of “The Memory & Motion” study using smart wristbands. In this research, people who had completed breast cancer treatment were monitored with smart wristbands, and regular exercisers were shown to be less affected by chemo-brain complaints such as forgetfulness.

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Study Details

The study included 87 women who had completed breast cancer treatment and led sedentary (inactive) lives. Of these, 43 entered the exercise arm and 44 the control arm, where no intervention was performed. Those in the exercise arm received smart wristbands to encourage behavioral change and motivation. Exercise plans were created for them, and to help reach the weekly exercise target of 150 minutes, telephone calls were also made in weeks 2 and 6. After 12 weeks of follow-up, the participants’ self-reported cognitive functions were compared with their prestudy levels and with one another.

Results

Participants were women with an average age of 57 who had been diagnosed with breast cancer within 5 years. When the two groups were compared overall, there was no significant difference in cognitive improvement. However, subgroup analysis showed that people who had recently completed breast cancer treatment (no more than 2 years after surgery) benefited significantly from exercise in terms of improved cognitive function.

The study shows that adopting an active lifestyle early after treatment may be one of the greatest favors you can do yourself, both for physical health and reaching an ideal weight, and for mental functioning.

Measuring Health with Activity Wristbands

The study used products from Fitbit, a pioneering company in wearable technologies and smart wristbands. Like most fitness trackers, Fitbit’s devices are not perfect. They can count steps quite well, measure heart rate and rhythm, and give a good idea of daily activity levels. However, there is not yet a product that can show how many calories you actually burn.

Although not perfect, smart wristbands have been tested in numerous clinical trials since entering active use in 2012: joint inflammation (arthritis), sleep apnea, activity monitoring in cancer patients, predicting heart attacks, and more…

For measuring health, with the most widely used activity wristband, Fitbit, scientists since 2012 have published 457 scientific studies, half of them in 2017.

Information collected from users is kept in a database called Fitbase and shared with scientists granted access. Information in the Fitbase database grows daily, to the extent that, since 2012, 3.5 billion minutes of Fitbit data have been collected.

Although Fitbit appears to place the greatest importance on measuring health digitally and expressing it scientifically, it is not the only company investing in digital health. Recently, another noteworthy study at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom and Stanford University in the United States showed that an artificial intelligence program evaluating data from Apple’s watch could predict a significant heart condition called atrial fibrillation.