From Thermometers to Wearables: The Evolution of Health Technology

To those of you new to our newsletter, welcome to Tech Corner! This is where I do a mini-dive into various, more technical topics. 

I want to talk about the widening world of wearables and the lines between wellness / health / and medical, but first, let’s talk about at-home medical devices. Today we can use at-home thermometers to check for fever whenever we feel slightly off, but while the mercury thermometer was invented in 1743, it wasn’t until 1867 that thermometers were small enough (15cm vs >30cm!) and worked fast enough (5 minutes for a reading vs 20 minutes!) to be widely used in clinics. The first clinical digital thermometer was released in 1954, when the electronic components were small enough to fit into a hand-held device. Now thermometers are a staple of every home, because it is important to be able to collect an accurate measurement on yourself to know more about your health without having to go into a clinic.

Clinical thermometer circa 1867

Out-of-clinic thermometer of the future?

So, back to wearables, it’s a very similar story! The explosion of wearable devices in the last 20 years has been facilitated by improved sensor accuracy and the miniaturization of the electronic components - battery technology and sensor technology has improved significantly to allow for longer-lasting, more robust devices at smaller scales. The drive remains the same; we want to be able to collect accurate measurements on ourselves to make informed decisions regarding our health. Wearable device measurements start in the soft ‘wellness’ realm out of necessity before moving into health. The measurement sensors are either new to outside-of-clinic environments and the technology has to be validated (ex: optical sensors for heart rate monitoring), or the measurement itself is new to the general population and has to reach critical mass of interest (ex: step counting as a proxy for how active you are, or blood oxygen level, which was primarily a clinical metric prior to COVID). The rise of wearable devices means that we have more information and personal access to data on ourselves, and at the same time we rely on companies (like hominin.ai!) to validate the technology and measurements through clinical and academic partnerships so we can trust the information is accurate, and we understand the “so what?” of all the data that’s now being collected. Innovation in this space is moving faster every day. It took 200 years for the thermometer to make it from invention to consumer product, our algorithms went from conceptualization to testing with real humans in less than 6 months. What an amazing age we live in  🧠

Want to know a bit more about my background and inspiration? Check out this segment from my interview on the Tech Business Podcast with Paul Essery! The full interview is here.