[ad_1]
Although the most modern smart watches on the market still cannot detect body temperature due to a number of factors, they can still be a crucial tool in identifying your health. Not only heart disease, but researchers are already trying to link heart rate and other signs to more diseases, like COVID-19.
It is not new that wearable devices, primarily Apple Watches and Fitbits, can identify irregular heart behavior. This ability of the sensors has even been responsible for diagnostics capable of helping save the lives of users around the world.
But how could a smart watch identify an illness with symptoms of fever, malaise, and others? The secret lies in vasodilation, the body’s reaction to inflammation. Your brain realizes that you need to increase your heart rate to increase the amount of blood that circulates through the inflamed regions, as your blood vessels dilate.
Graphics displayed on cardiogramSource: MacWorld
This discovery came from the co-founder of the Cardiogram app, an app available on Apple Watches and Google’s WearOS devices. Operators of these devices can now monitor and view reports of heartbeats during sleep.
When idle, your body tends to have a constant rate of beats per minute. However, diseases can interfere with this behavior and generate obvious fluctuations. This means that the study of the heart rate during sleep is a source of information to determine simple diseases, such as the flu, or more serious ones, such as COVID-19.
Still, Cardiogram is still looking at these fluctuations and interferences in heart rate, as other factors can also change these numbers, including alcohol intake, caffeine consumption, anxiety, and others. Therefore, your smart watch will still not notify you if your heart rate mysteriously fluctuates.
Heart rate can indicate the presence of infectious agents.Source: (Doug Duvall / IDG)
Data is strength
FitBit devices don’t have the Cardiogram app, but they can display your estimated blood oxygen level, in addition to monitoring your heart rate at night. Although the results are not instantaneous and accurate, the portable device can identify the levels of oxygen in the blood by the behavior of your body while sleeping.
Determining this number in conjunction with heart rate analysis can generate more accurate diagnoses and determine the presence of infectious agents. However, as these are ongoing studies, it is not yet possible to use the information collected by smart watches to determine influenza and other illnesses. However, we can expect more features to come to the watches.
