If you have had the chance to wear one of those new wearable or body worn bracelets or gadgets then you already know that they can, of course, enable you to track your own personal health information and store it in the “cloud”. It is likely that in the next few years more data will become available from an individual with these wearable devices that will enable caregivers to increase monitoring on various health conditions. Monitoring will go beyond the basic heart rate, pulse oximetry, and blood pressure devices that are prevalent today.
Perhaps a wireless ECG for in-home use, or a medical device that detects changes in blood chemistry, such as a continuous glucose monitoring, will soon become common. So what happens if you and your loved one have the same type of device? What if the data your caregiver receives under your name belongs to your spouse and not you because the device or reader was mixed up? If the wearable device is actually an implant and data were to be mixed up with your significant other, who could potentially have the same implant, it could be a major problem if. An example of this misfortune could result in medications being given based on the data that was collected.
Take a consumer medical device such as a Wireless Blood Pressure device and give it to someone else to check their blood pressure and suddenly their result ends up in your history! As a colleague of mine stated, “We should pay as much attention to the security of our health data as we do to our banking data”.
That is why Bernie Keppler from, Ellipson Technology, developed and patented, a technique for using biometric control to move patient data from the device to a web portal. It ensures the data belongs to the patient before it is transferred to his or hers electronic record.
Biometric control can be as simple as a fingerprint or as complex as facial recognition, or even something as sophisticated and cool as an iris scan. In other words, to take the reading from your device, the device must recognize only you, and to move data to the cloud where it will be stored (securely), the device must recognize it is only from you. That way when the Caregiver or Doctor looks at your record they know for sure that, the device, data and you all match!
As these wearable devices become evermore complex and more critical data is gathered, knowing it is from the correct patient will be not only necessary but also mandatory.
As you sit down and design your next medical device or wearable make sure you consider how the data collected is captured securely from the correct individual.View our video on our newest technology platform, Compendium to learn about secure data in the wearable industry or click below to download a brochure on this secure implant and physiological data connectivity.
Do you want to discuss wearable devices and secure patient data? I’d love the opportunity to talk to you. Simply send me an email at johneck@valtronic.com