admin Livongo’s a leading digital health service primarily for people with diabetes and used by 164,000 with chronic medical conditions.
Now, it is working with the leading smartwatch companies, including Apple Watch and Fitbit, as part of an expansive shift from wellness to medical use-cases. It will provide alerts about things like healthy eating, exercise and relaxation.
Wearables have been as soon as precisely adjusted on health and more getting used to assist people handle medical situations, like diabetes and coronary heart illness. This might make these gadgets extra widespread, remodeling them from a “good to have” right into a “should have” for a subset of individuals, and open up new income fashions, corresponding to getting insurance coverage firms to subsidize the gadgets for their prospects.
In U.S. 6 in 10 American adults suffer from no less than one persistent illness.
Livongo was founded in 2014 and started with technology that people with diabetes can use to manage their disease like glucose meters, test strips and lancets. It also offers designed a mobile app for health coaching.
Now, the company says the Livongo app will work with smartwatches to send notifications to help patients manage their diseases. For example, a Livongo user’s Apple Watch might alert them to take a blood sugar reading in the morning before breakfast, which can be an insightful metric for people with diabetes, or to suggest they eat low-starch veggies before lunch or to swap out a sugary beverage for soda.
The company’s chief product officer Amar Kendale said that not all nudges work, or are relevant, but the team has been studying them for years to try to get the right balance. The company wants to avoid “alert fatigue,” he noted — the last thing the company wants is for users to feel overloaded.
Fitbit’s general manager of health solutions Adam Pellegrini, said that the integration with Livongo’s app is about driving better health outcomes and behavior change — and that moves both companies beyond activity tracking.” (It) underscores the growing role that wearables and Fitbit devices play in the management of chronic conditions,” he explained
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