New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center is giving fitness trackers to blood-cancer patients to monitor their reactions to treatment. The hospital is one of several turning to wearable tech to create data that will help streamline and personalise medical-care plans. Although the data generated isn't accurate enough for clinical use, it does offer an insight into "general trends" and can be useful. A new study published in JAMA, a medical journal, found that people who wore Fitbit activity monitors were more likely than those wearing other devices to report feeling better after treatment with chemotherapy.
New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center is giving fitness trackers to blood-cancer patients to monitor their reactions to treatment. The hospital is one of several turning to wearable tech to create data that will help streamline and personalise medical-care plans. Although the data generated isn't accurate enough for clinical use, it does offer an insight into "general trends" and can be useful. One small study used Fitbits to determine whether patients were healthy enough to undergo chemotherapy, while another tried to establish a link between weight loss and improved survival rates in breast cancer.