In this opinion piece, NSSN Ambassador at Macquarie University, Dr Noushin Nasiri, elaborates on advanced wearables and their potential for transforming healthcare.

Wearable devices are often promoted as new developments complementing the set of personal gadgets assisting us in our busy day-to-day lives. But the first personalised wearable device, the humble specs, was actually invented in the 13th century in Italy.

Three hundred years later, in the early 16th century, we had the first wearable clock-watches, that led to the invention of the wristwatch. A 100 years later, Cheng Dawei, a famous Chinese mathematician, invented the abacus ring, allowing traders to perform quick calculations.

Moving on another 300 years, the world experienced the rise of wearable technologies from a wearable camera in 1907, implantable pacemaker in 1958, transistor hearing aid in the 1980s to Bluetooth headset and iPod in 1999-2001. Devices such as hearing aids and Cochlear implants have come a long way from the Ear Trumpets (17th century) to the tiny but mighty devices behind the ear, empowering millions of people with hearing loss to sense the world around them as loud as it gets.

Wearable technologies are becoming increasingly popular among Australians. About one in five Australians own at least one wearable device, and about one in four use a smartphone app to monitor their physical activities routinely. The wearable device market is currently having a worldwide profit of around $45 billion and is expected to reach above $75 billion by 2026 owing to wearables' ease of use, flexibility, and convenience.

*From right to left: eyeglasses, watch, abacus ring, Google glass, smartwatch, smart ring. Image supplied.*

The real impact of wearables is in the potential for these technologies to transform our present healthcare system entirely. Today, most healthcare systems operate on a "sick care" basis. This means one has to show serious symptoms of a potentially fatal condition to be diagnosed and treated.

Today, we wait for a heart attack to strike, then receive care. We wait for cancer to grow, and then we start the treatment. We wait for the symptoms to be severe, and only then do we visit our GP. How often do we visit our GP anyway? Twice a year? If each GP visit was one hour long, that leaves us with 8700 hours of unmonitored health per year! And what if, while we're taking our wellness for granted, a chronic disease hits upon us without warning?

Advanced wearables, much like dogs, can detect the earliest signs of health-related abnormalities by analysing the disease biomarkers in body fluids, including tear, sweat and saliva, as well as in exhaled breath.

Researchers at Macquarie University's NanoTech Laboratory have developed tiny biosensors detecting low concentrations of breath biomarkers in complex gas mixtures, like human breath. Detecting such trace concentration of the biomarker using a wearable device is not an easy task, as differentiating between the thousands of molecules present in exhaled breath requires atomic-scale tailoring of reaction sites and efficient transduction of sensing reactions.

Another recent development in wearable technologies is the SunWatch, a new wearable UV sensing device developed at Macquarie University that detects harmful ultraviolet rays in real-time, warning beachgoers of overexposure. In countries such as Australia and New Zealand that have some of the world's highest melanoma rates – the SunWatch is a lifesaver.

The sky is the limit when it comes to wearable technologies in healthcare, and the potential for innovation extends way beyond fitness trackers. In the next decades, the healthcare system will become unrecognisable from what it is today. Algorithms will aid medical practitioners with monitoring patients' health remotely and keep check of their wellbeing by using a comprehensive dashboard of data that will make personalised medicine a reality.

Dr Noushin Nasiri leads NanoTech Laboratory at the School of Engineering, Macquarie University. In 2017, she has received her PhD in Nanotechnology from the Australian National University (ANU) and then, worked as a postdoctoral at University of Technology Sydney, Faculty of Science where she continued working on nano-structured materials for health, energy and environment application.

In 2018, she joined the School of Engineering at Macquarie University as a Lecturer and Group Leader. Her research lies at the intersection of science, technology and engineering as she is focusing on early stage detection of diseases through analysing human breath.

Learn more about Noushin, here.

Using wearables to create a proactive healthcare system