Wearables will drive Big Data adoption in healthcare: Research

In 2014, nearly 42 million wearable wireless sports, fitness and wellness devices are expected to ship worldwide. As consumers continue to use these devices from players such as Fitbit, Nike, Jawbone and others to track their levels of activity, there is growing impetus to also leverage the data to inform health management and healthcare provision, according to ABI Research.

According to the market research firm, device collected data is generally open to exporting from devices and their manufacturer delivered data collection apps into third party applications. These often provide preferred scope for additional data from other devices or sources to be viewed within a single app, but increasingly they will provide a gateway into bringing activity data into healthcare provision.

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“Millions of people are tracking their levels of activity daily and healthcare providers are increasingly examining ways to leverage this data to improve levels of care and efficiency,” said ABI Research principal analyst Jonathan Collins.

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An emerging collection of cloud application players including Ginger.io and Validic are targeting wearable wireless sports, fitness and wellness device and smartphone application data to bring insights into personal medical records and in turn provide actionable healthcare data. For healthcare providers this data can help inform everything from treatment plans to health insurance actuarial rates as well as drive pharma studies.

The ongoing proliferation of wearable device data and support for its absorption into healthcare services is part of the wider adoption of big data collection and analysis within healthcare and social assistance. While spending on big data analysis lags a host of other global industry sectors it reached $182.44 million worldwide last year.

At present the concept and the development of bringing activity data into healthcare services is at its earliest stage and the bulk of the big data spending in healthcare is geared toward providing the framework and infrastructure to support initiatives primarily around actuarial and pharma studies; however, over the next five years spending on bringing these wearable wireless consumer activity device collected data into healthcare big data analysis will grow to a $52 million market by 2019.