Darwin said it best, “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.” Wearable technology is coming to a wrist near you and if you’re involved in content creation, you need to be ready.
There are hundreds of industries that will benefit from wearable technology, but one of the first industries primed to radically change will be healthcare. How people make decisions about their health, manage their health and communicate with healthcare professionals will all change because of wearable technologies.
Wearables Hold Significant Advances for the Healthcare Industry
We have long looked for ways to help people change their behavior in service to better health. But how to do this was complex—how do you remind people to eat wisely, sleep well, exercise for their physical and mental benefit and warn them when they were going off course? Wearable technologies offer this promise.
Wearable technology provides a symbiotic relationship between the patient/consumer and the healthcare professional/marketer. The advantages for both parties are clear: people can connect their behavior to data. That data can help healthcare professionals make better decisions about care, including the content they provide to support those decisions.
This data also provides rich fields of information ripe for harvest about consumer choices—not just what works and when, but patterns of behavior that will provide healthcare marketers the ability to understand their audiences better than before.
Creating Wearable Content
There are already numerous ways to provide information to consumers—let’s look at these possible examples:
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A diabetic patient sends in his blood sugar numbers for the day—the doctor’s office sends back an article on managing your carb intake more effectively
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A heart failure patient monitors his blood pressure and weight every days and sends those numbers to his doctor—the program notices an unhealthy trend and alerts the office to send the patient an request for an appointment and a video about salt intake
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A pregnant woman tagged for preeclampsia risk sends her blood pressure numbers to her doctor everyday so she can avoid pre-term labor—her numbers continue to remain low so the office sends her an article about exercising safely during pregnancy
All the scenarios described above are exciting because they place active management into the hands of the consumer. Particularly with chronic diseases, wearable technology is going to transform behavior. The question is: are you ready with content to support your patients’ behavior and choices? If not, you need to start thinking about your content strategy for wearables—content will need to be short, two-way and personalized.
Are you ready?
