More and more people are using e-health applications, varying from websites to wearable wristbands. The enormous amount of data gathered with these applications has the potential to not only change individual health and behaviour, but also the way health care in general is organized. Postdoc researcher Liseth Tjin-Kam-Jet – Siemons and PhD-student Floor Sieverink run a project that aims to chart this potential.
‘Take, for instance, one of the wristbands now available’, says Floor Sieverink. ‘It will gather data on your movements, your heartbeat, blood pressure and sleeping pattern. You may have an app that records your eating habits and your weight. That’s a lot of data. You may simply present the results to the user, but it’s also possible to give advice, like: this week you haven’t been exercising as much as usual, shouldn’t you go out for a walk? It may, based on all these factors, even be able to predict that you are at the point of falling ill.’
