Tech & Innovation in Healthcare

Question: Wearable devices can track heart rate, sleeping patterns, and other key health factors that provide healthcare providers with an accurate picture of the patients’ lives outside of the doctor’s office.>

Could wearable devices be useful for tracking patients after traumatic events?>

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Answer: Recently, research was published in JAMA Psychiatry regarding the use of wearables for patients following a traumatic event. In the study, researchers tracked 2,021 subjects for eight weeks after they were exposed to traumatic stress. Each subject was given a sensor-based wrist-wearable device, which they were to wear for at least 21 hours a day.

The subjects were recruited to the study after reporting an emergency department (ED) visit following a traumatic stress exposure incident. These types of incidents include:

• Motor vehicle accident
• Physical assault
• Sexual assault
• Serious fall
• Mass casualty incident

The wearable device was capable of gauging 24-hour rest-activity characteristics, which “are prevalent and may have utility in measuring [the] outcomes,” the study maintained. Researchers discovered eight biomarkers that related to symptoms of adverse posttraumatic neuropsychiatric sequelae (APNS). The symptoms reported include:

• Pain
• Depression
• Avoidance of trauma reminders
• Reexperiencing trauma
• Anxiety
• Hyperarousal
• Sleep disruption
• Nightmares

The researchers found the sleep disruption biomarker was also related to changes in anxiety, sleep, and pain. The results also showed changes in six rest-activity measures were associated with pain variations over time.

The researchers did acknowledge certain limitations in the study, such as that all of the subjects reported to the ED and most of them were motor vehicle accident survivors, which means the data may be skewed toward a specific traumatic event rather than generalized.

In the end, the findings of the study suggest that wrist-wearable devices show promise following stressful events. “These findings suggest that wrist-wearable device biomarkers may have utility as screening tools for pain, sleep, and anxiety symptom outcomes after trauma exposure in high-risk populations,” researchers of the study wrote.