Wearables and big data to lead revolution in healthcare

Innovation in wearables and big data is set to lead a revolution in healthcare, an expert panel told the Web Summit.

The gathering of data and the introduction of big data could lead to a revolution of the medtech industry, Nervana Systems' Arjun Bansal said, delivering real change through insights delivered in real time for users. Nymi founder Karl Martin said the the wearables industry had a "dirty secret", namely that most people stopped wearing them after 30 to 60 days.

“I think the initial introduction of wearables in the consumer space was in some ways a little bit of false hope initially because, first of all, most things were just counting steps, and the insights were somewhat limited on that,” he said.

However, an increase in power in smartwatches or the use of data in the cloud could use machine learning to deliver personalised insights and inspire that behavioural change, he said.