Golden, wearable health trackers – the future of healthcare?

January 24, 2017   |   Evidence in Integrative Healthcare

The wearable health tracker industry has grown tremendously in the last couple of years as evidenced by the number of different products available to measure a range of personal health information. The market has expanded from smartwatches and wristbands designed to capture fitness measures such as number of steps/miles walked to jackets, shirts and headbands that can measure heart rate, temperature, sleep status, etc. A recent development at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has cleared the path for a number of other wearable electronic devices that could measure our health in a new way. Incorporating gold into a porous, thin plastic membrane creates a sensing medium that is very flexible, non-toxic, durable, and comfortable enough that it could be worn on or inside the body. To read more about how this technology could be used to look at many real-time changes in our bodies as they relate to preventing and/or monitoring diseases, click here to visit the NIST website.