Something exciting has started to happen, it shows up more and more products and tools that help us understand our health. There has been significant progress the last years in how we can track and following our health.
The technology has made data collection cheaper and more convenient to follow up data to see what and how we can improve. Questions we today ask the doctors we will tomorrow be able to ask our data.
An example of this is Ari Meisel, watch Ari explain how he cured his Crohn’s disease by following data and self-experimentation.
The technology has not only made it cheaper and more convenient, but it allows us to quantify the biometrics that we didn’t know existed. Want to know your insulin or cortisol levels, or sequencing your DNA, or learn what microbial cells inhabit your body? You can quantify that now.
Where there are trends, there are opportunities. 69% of U.S. adults track at least one health metric; however, 49% of trackers say they keep track of progress “in their heads”.
Hopefully it will change in the long run, it has namely been funding records both in 2012 and 2013 in digital health.
But hopefully it will in the long run change for the better as it both the 2012 and 2013 turned financial records. Digital health funding was up 39% from 2012 and 119% compared to 2011. “In 2014, the digital health industry is set to surpass total medical device venture funding.”
I which is an optimization junkie, both privately and to the profession, think this is really interesting. Self-trackers widens the horizons of personal health and hopefully entrepreneurs and VC funding can help it scale.