It's a Dog's Life

Ripley was always a special dog. He joined his new owners shortly after the tragic death of their previous puppy, Dexter. As Kate Castle, his owner, told me: “Dexter was the dog we had so desperately wanted. Two weeks after we said goodbye, we realized that the only thing that was going to help was to bring another furry friend into our lives. After Rip chose us, we soon realized that while Dexter had been the dog we wanted, Ripley was the dog we needed.”

New pup Ripley soon captured the hearts of his family and become a fixture in the neighborhood, regularly visiting the residents of a nearby home for disabled adults. By the time he was two years old, he was qualified as a therapy dog, working regularly with special needs kids in the local school system. “From early on,” said Castle, “Ripley always wanted to be with people who seemed to need him.”

Image: Kate Castle

Ripley's owners realized, after speaking with their veterinarian, that he was going to need a very active lifestyle, with at least two hours activity per day, to stay fit and healthy. Labradors are notorious for their food fixation and given the opportunity will happily eat themselves into a state of morbid obesity. So when Kate came across a crowd-funding campaign for Whistle, a collar-mounted wearable dog activity tracker, she felt it was something that could be useful for Ripley.

The market for wearable pet technologies is expanding rapidly, with predictions the market could be worth in excess of $2.3 billion by 2022, and that pet owners could be spending more on wearable devices than on pet food as soon as next year. Several different manufacturers are offering collar-mounted GPS trackers and activity monitors, like the Whistle, cameras, and a number of webcam-based systems such as the PetCube, which allow concerned owners to keep track of what their pets are up to at home when they are out at work, and even communicate with them and play remotely.

While some of the uses of pet-focused technologies are pretty obvious—it doesn't take a genius to realize that attaching a GPS tracker to your pet makes it more likely that you will find them again if they go astray—some potential applications are only becoming clear as the technologies mature and more devices find their way into the hands of consumers.

Ripley's owners were reassured that with his Whistle, they could keep a close track of the exercise he was getting when walking with them and when he was out with his dog walker. So when one day they spotted a sudden reduction in his high-activity minutes, from his usual 60 down to seven, they knew something was wrong. Ripley himself seemed OK; perhaps a little quiet, but not especially sick.

“I am not sure I would have taken him to the vet right away without having the data from Whistle,” said Castle. “It’s so hard that dogs can’t talk and tell us what's wrong but the Whistle let me know that something was not right.”

Kate trusted her instincts and the Whistle activity data and took Ripley to the vet that day. They found he was dehydrated with a high temperature over 105 degrees Fahrenheit, and he was admitted immediately for tests and supportive treatment.

After a few days in the animal hospital, Ripley made a good recovery from a nasty infection. Now aged four, he continues to thrive. But Kate is convinced that without the Whistle, things could have been very different.

“I think if we had waited a day to take Rip to the vet, with the high fever he had, it could have been a much worse outcome so give huge props to our Whistle for giving a voice to our dog!”

from It's a Dog's Life

Wearable Monitoring Tech May Not Always Be Good for Your Health

It's mid-morning, and you're at work. Your smartphone buzzes, a notification— "HealthAlert triggered. Await call."

A moment later, your phone rings. The caller introduces himself as a medical technician from the live health monitoring service you subscribe to. Some unusual readings have been detected on your EKG. It's probably no cause for concern, but perhaps you could answer some follow-up questions.

Yes, you do feel a little nauseous, and yes, your skin does maybe feel a little clammy, now that he mentions it. No, you have no chest pain or shortness of breath. You forget, in the moment, yesterday's late night and “one or two” drinks with old college friends. The technician, his voice level and professional, advises—just as a precaution—that you should be checked out at the hospital. An ambulance has been called.

This may seem far-fetched, but the market in wearable health monitoring devices, particularly targeting the “worried well”—people without specific health problems, who are concerned with managing their health and wellness—is exploding, with predictions that the global market in medical wearable devices will more than double, from $3.2 billion in 2015 to almost $8 billion in 2020. The QardioCore, launched at this year's CES by Qardio, "the only company that cares as much about design as about medical accuracy," awaits FDA approval. Strapped around your chest, it provides live EKG, respiratory rate, and even an assessment of your stress levels via an iOS app. Companies like PhysIQ, meanwhile, are chomping at the bit to commercialize remote health monitoring services, identifying a key market to "empower health-conscious consumers." With subscription models a favored strategy of technology companies, it's only a matter of time.

But what about you? By now, you've been wheeled into an emergency room wearing nasal oxygen prongs. Several hours, an EKG, echocardiogram, numerous blood samples and a precautionary dose of anticoagulant medication later, you're discharged from hospital. There's nothing wrong with your heart—it was a false alarm. What a relief!

A good news story, then; the occasional false alarm and resulting nuisance are surely worth the chance to detect a life-threatening problem?

At what cost, though?

A sick day you didn’t need to take. And large bill for you, your medical insurer, or your country's social health service—for an uninsured patient in the US, this hospital visit could easily set you back around $10,000 and potentially considerably more. You suffered unnecessary worry, uncomfortable diagnostic tests, and were given medications that could cause serious side effects, all because of an uninterpretable wobble detected by a health gadget.

False positives in routine screening—such as Pap smears, mammograms, and PSA tests—are a well-recognized problem. Evidence suggests that each 10,000 screening mammograms performed on women between the ages of 50 and 59 will produce 932 "false alarms" leading to further investigations, tests, and potentially to unnecessary biopsies and surgeries being performed on healthy patients. There is no perfect diagnostic test—every test will return some negative results when they should have been positive, and vice versa.

Imagine a good test, which produces a false positive result one time in 100. Used in sick patients whose doctors suspect a disease, it will produce one additional, incorrect positive result along with, say, 50 true positive results. If the test says you're sick, there's about a 2 percent chance it's wrong. This same test, screening 100 healthy people where just 3 percent are genuinely affected would still return that single false positive—this time alongside just three genuine results. Now, if the test says you're sick, there's a 25 percent chance it's wrong. The less common the disease, the stronger this effect becomes. The more different tests you run—the more parameters you monitor, and the more often—the more likely you are to be caught out.

There are plenty of reasons for caution as we rush into this new world of personalized healthcare—not least privacy and data security concerns—but the risk of overdiagnosis and unnecessary medical interventions should, perhaps, also cause us to pause before we strap the next generation of monitors to our chests and head out to work.

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from Wearable Monitoring Tech May Not Always Be Good for Your Health