Wearables and Apps in Our Students' Lives

After teaching my students about apps and wearables in regards to nutrition and healthy life choices, there are a couple of thoughts that I had at the end of the unit. Just wanted to share them with anyone interested.

There are many reasons that we are doing this assignment and so that you have a complete understanding here are a couple of reasons:

1. So what are wearable and app roles in health? The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics states that during March, which is the National Nutrition Month we need to make “informed food choices and develop sound eating habits and physical activity habits.” It’s not always easy, I get that, but it IS important. What you eat and how much of it you eat directly relates to your personal health and well being. Any teacher knows the information a teacher is taught one day may “just disappear,” so with that in mind I offer you one piece of advice...TRACK IT! Apps are making not only tracking our overall intake of calories, but also our output. As a student of life, you need to take small steps to incorporating this into your life. That is EXACTLY what this assignment is guiding you to understand. Apps make this easy for you and so can wearables.
   
   
2. Wearables such as Apple Watches, Fitbits and Up Bands are no longer restricted to the higher socioeconomic class. Wearables are becoming more affordable for EVERYONE, from adults all the way down to children. Just the other day, not only one month after the Apple Watch was released a student of mine had it on his wrist and was already utilizing the health tracker built in. This amazing technology is not going to be the oddity anymore, it’s going to become the norm!
   
   
3. A recent article from wired magazine has highlighted several points about why wearable tech will be so prevalent in the future.
   
   
1. Wearables will start to become invisible and seamless. They will be part of our everyday devices, not something that takes thought to wear or sync. The Apple Watch is already a step up from the Jawbone UP band. Not only is it a watch, something most people wear daily, but it automatically syncs with devices. Invisible beyond what a person is used to.
   
   
2. Personalized and accurate can’t even begin to describe the research and data that goes into the numbers people are reading. Height, weight, age are not just numbers to your wearable, they create a profile that averages thousands of similar peoples’ data that will now make the most accurate estimation. Personalized you may ask, I think so!
   
   
3. Efficient is always a hard thing to satisfy. What happens when you go on a week long trip in the mountains and want to record every step of the way your daily energy expense. I don’t want to be the Tech Titan, but get a Solar Charger! To be quite honest I had to get one quickly because of the remote parts of China I have travelled to. You never know when you’ll need a charge, being prepared is another Life Skill in itself.
   
   
4. Regardless if you think wearables are a waste of time or just a marketing gimmick, you’ll have to take my opinion for what it’s worth. With the amount of deaths that happen because of heart related conditions and the entire world heading further and further into FAT dept, a wearable that could call for emergencies and is smart enough to recognize when your body is not reacting the way it should, could start to get EMS personnel on site faster which increases survival rate. Just knowing what you are doing to your body can start to help you make good lifestyle choices and if this assignment does that, then it’s served its purpose.
   
   
4. It was touched on briefly, but the medical field is going to LOVE wearables in the future. These tools are going to help doctors achieve early diagnosis of many diseases such as congestive heart failure, identify conditions and habits of diabetes, improve management of neurodegenerative conditions and again as mentioned before alert emergency personnel to situations that render the victim unable to call for their own help. Applications are being developed and not only your nutrition can benefit from them, but your life!