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Wearable fitness trackers such as FitBit could help military patients recover quicker, according to Col. Deydre Teyhen, an official with from the Defense Health Headquarter’s Office of the Surgeon General. The trackers could help patients with musculoskeletal conditions gauge how much physical activity they can handle without exacerbating their injuries, Teyhen told an audience at a conference hosted by tech association, AFCEA and reported by NextGov.
Device-agnostic software is needed to allow soldiers to use the devices they already own, she said. “The question becomes, is it a one-size-fits-all solution?”
For instance, some patients begin to feel better before their soft tissue heals fully, and start walking around more, which could inhibit their recovery process, she explained. An effective system might send that patient a notification on their fitness tracker to say, “‘You’ve done great, at 1,000 to 2,000 steps a day,’ and it gives you a warning … ‘You might actually be doing too much and you might cause a setback.’ If you give them that warning in real time, then they can change their behaviors.”
William K.
“You Might” is an almost worthless warning. “STOP” would be better, and “At 80%” would be a more worthwhile type of message. But would the data accumulated by the fitness tracker thing be accurate enough to have much real value? That would be the first question. But I also wonder about how many of those in the active military service would even have such a device. My recollection is that tha majority of physical activities in the military service were not my own choice and were not optional. So the whole concept may be based on an incorrect premise.