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Wearable technology covers a massive scope of products and ideas from smart watches to Google Glass; but wearable health technology may be one of the fastest growing segments of the market thanks to two contributors: the Affordable Care Act, and our national obsession with data. What is readily available in developed countries often times comes with great effort in third world countries, causing easily preventable medical conditions to wreak havoc on the population. A great example is soap, and how the lack of this most basic of products causes serious illness in these countries, but technology is educating these communities and providing access to resources. The Zambian Ministry of Health and IBM are coming together to provide citizens access to 200 lifesaving drugs with support from the World Bank, the Department for International Development, UNICEF and The London Business School. The healthcare industry in the United States has an annual budget of almost $3 trillion, and while most everyone agrees there is gross waste and incompetence, the reforms put in place are making a difference. One of the rules effectively implemented is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and many companies provide services to ensure healthcare providers remain compliant. This is because any lapses in safeguarding electronic protected health information (ePHI) can result in hefty fines and even imprisonment. Verizon is one of the companies providing healthcare enabled services with facilities around the country. The Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and many new laws and regulations have been implemented by healthcare reforms to introduce new levels of efficiency in the industry. Financial pressures are intensifying throughout the healthcare industry. Who doesn't want to receive their medical care easily through telecommunications? Not WebMD, but real healthcare. MDLive, a major provider of telehealth services and software, sought the answer to this question with its 2014 Mobile Health Index. Conducted online in March by Harris Poll, the 2014 Mobile Health Index surveyed 2,000 adults over the age of 18 in the United States to determine the healthcare habits and preferences of Americans. There is no denying the amount of data we create every day is increasing by leaps and bounds, but the data storage across the human body is truly incredible. According to Yevgeniy Grigoryev, PhD, a Biology Lecturer at City College of New York, the approximate data stored in the human body is 150 zettabytes. One zettabyte is 1,099,511,627,776 gigabytes, so the challenges big data presents in medicine are huge to say the least. Ok, Google Glass just got a little less dorky. Where the device has fought a reputation (at the worst) as a slightly creepy option for people to watch and record others, and (at the best) as a toy for the nerdiest of tech nerds, physicians are putting the device to a use everyone can applaud. Doctors in the Oncology Department at Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Center in Detroit, MI have purchased two of the high-tech eyewear devices to provide increased monitoring of post-surgical patients. LibertyHealth Jersey City Medical Center announced it had saved some significant time and costs using the Practice Unite solution. BioTime, Inc. has announced that its subsidiary company, LifeMap Sciences, has created a medical technology startup of its own called LifeMap Solutions, Inc.
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