Today’s smartwatches are designed with a focus on personal health and safety. Apple Watch has long led the charge, but competitors like Samsung, Garmin, and Fitbit have been quick to embrace the trend and drive the technology with their own innovations.
Five Smartwatch Health and Safety Features
Although originally designed to track fitness, smartwatches like Apple Watch now incorporate some powerful features that make them ideal for remotely monitoring the health and safety of others.
Medical ID
Many smartwatches allow you to create a medical ID that appears on the lock screen, giving first responders and other medical professionals easy access to your age, blood type, allergies, and medical conditions.
Contacting Emergency Services
In case of an emergency, smartwatches typically make it easy to call for help. With the press of a button, you can place a call to 911 and/or broadcast SOS alerts to your emergency contact(s).
Fall Detection
Most smartwatches have built-in sensors that can detect hard falls. Typically, if the watch detects a hard fall *and* senses that you’ve been motionless for a period of time, it will tap your wrist to notify you. If you fail to respond, it will then sound an alarm and place an emergency call.
Crash Detection
Smartwatches are also sophisticated enough to detect a severe crash by reading data from the built-in gyroscope and accelerometer. As with fall detection, the watch will attempt to notify you if it senses you’re motionless. If you don’t respond, it will notify emergency services with your location and status.
Remote Monitoring and Tracking
Apple Watch includes a Family Setup feature that allows you to easily communicate with other watch wearers and even track them in real time. Although this functionality was originally intended to allow parents to keep an eye on their kids, its health and safety applications are virtually limitless.
Pairing Apple Watch with an Intelligent Guardian
The built-in functionality of smartwatches like Apple Watch makes it possible for folks to monitor their health and quickly summon assistance in case of an emergency. However, pairing this functionality with the remote real-time monitoring and predictive alerts of an intelligent guardian platform like SafeGuard takes health and safety to a whole new level.
Real-Time Monitoring of Remote Patients or Workers
Smartwatches are designed–first and foremost–for personal use. However, once a smartwatch is integrated with SafeGuard, its potential for real-time remote monitoring is fully unlocked. With just a quick glance at a user-friendly display, safety managers or caretakers can get up-to-the-second readings on their worker or patient’s heart rate, blood oxygen levels, respiratory rate, body temperature, and even the amount of time spent sleeping.
Now imagine dozens of people wearing smartwatches, with all of their physiological data being collected, aggregated, and delivered in real time to someone watching over them. This kind of functionality makes it so much easier to safely and easily monitor multiple persons without worrying that someone is going to be overlooked or slip through the cracks.
But, who has time to sit in front of a screen methodically looking for abnormal readings?
Proactive Alerts on Potential Problems
True intelligent guardian software provides so much more than scalability and a convenient interface. Using edge AI and cutting-edge algorithms, a platform like SafeGuard takes all of that data and analyzes it for changes and warning signs that might indicate the potential health issues, such as the progression of chronic cardiopulmonary conditions, memory/mental health issues, and even infections that might not be readily apparent.
In other words, an intelligent guardian platform can pour through the info it receives from a smartwatch and distill that data into proactive warnings, providing alerts to potential problems before they escalate into full-blown health issues.
This means health and safety monitoring can be automated and can be used in multiple scenarios for those who wear a smartwatch and those who have responsibility for their immediate and long-term health and safety.