How Digital Biomarkers Help in Diagnosing Disease
Every human being leaves traces of his existence in real life or the virtual world. Examining these traces can tell a lot more about the person than just his identity.
In the modern era, diagnosing diseases does not require multiple tests. For instance, if a person uses a wearable device for health tracking, their subconscious actions can help doctors to diagnose diseases.
A person’s typing patterns from keyboards or smartphones can reveal several details about his personality. Similarly, such signals can also tell about a person’s health. It can determine certain diseases and how far the condition has progressed.
The rate at which online technologies acquire medical information has dramatically increased due to the global spread of digital devices such as smartphones and wearables. Patients’ digital biomarkers are also included in the healthcare data collected by these machines.
Market of Digital Biomarkers
The global digital biomarkers market was worth $524.6 million in 2018 and is predicted to increase to $5,637.3 million by the end of 2025, with a double-digit compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40.39 percent during the forecast period. The increased number of synergistic linkages among industry players is primarily responsible for the expansion.
Several factors, such as the rising use of smartphones and wearables, high-speed networking, and connectivity solutions, have helped increase the digital biomarkers market’s growth rate. There are currently about 2.0 billion smartphone users worldwide, with the number predicted to rise to roughly 6 billion in the future years.
By the end of 2020, the use of high-speed networks such as 3G and 4G is expected to expand by 73 percent globally. In addition, there is a growing desire for solutions that can effectively reduce healthcare expenses and assist in treating patients with chronic diseases by identifying disorders using various biomarkers.
Keystrokes are digital signals currently used as digital biomarkers or indications of physical health.
Due to the explosion of smart gadgets and sensors and the development of AI in healthcare to recognize health patterns, everyone has access to digital signals to determine health.
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Application of Digital Biomarkers
While digital biomarkers are slowly finding application in a variety of health issues, such as high blood pressure and sleep apnea, these elements are especially conducive to tracking behavioral changes (though not exclusively).
Experts have known that behaviors and social interactions might reveal a lot about disease conditions for a long time. Still, researchers have never been able to collect and analyze this information.
Patients with chronic diseases will benefit from digital biomarker discovery. However, they cannot have regular consultations or recollect specific symptoms on a particular day. As a result, digital predictive biomarkers are used to regularly evaluate the patient’s state and help in delivering high-quality care.
Furthermore, a doctor’s ability to evaluate and correctly track any slight changes in a patient’s symptoms is extremely beneficial in preventing the progression of catastrophic diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. As a result, diagnostic biomarkers might be seen as the face of medicine in the future, as they can help develop individualized treatments for patients.
Digital Biomarkers Adding to the Healthcare Data
The expansion of healthcare data can be linked to increased access to and acceptance of digital tools. The capacity of these systems allows clinicians to constantly monitor patients. Consumer-facing digital tools increase the number of people who can collect health data.
The medical research community has access to data sets and analytics that allow for a diagnosis based on atypical data sets due to the proximity of wearables, smartphones, and social media around individuals at all times.
Individuals who were not patients or formally involved in medical trials were historically excluded from data gathering methods. However, digital tools allow anyone with an internet connection to track and monitor their health status outside healthcare settings. For instance, typical blood pressure cuff monitors give static and occasional data. On the other hand, wrist-worn devices can often record vital signs or concerns about one’s health over the time with minimal effort from any end user.
Furthermore, the online footprint that an individual leaves when they interact with the internet, whether through online browsing or online activity, gives new data that can be used in healthcare. Consumers on social media such as Facebook and Twitter are often ready to contribute their data, allowing researchers to establish links between that data and health outcomes.
Digital biomarkers provide a low-cost way to extend the collection of population-level health data over time while also introducing longitudinal data for consumers. It is feasible to acquire real-time data via passive and constant monitoring over long periods.
Devices to Collect Biomarkers
There are different types of biomarkers that are collected from different platforms. Ocular devices collect information such as eye moments, while ingestible sensors detect bodily functions and medication checks. Moreover, devices such as accelerometers, implantable components/sensors, smart home systems, artificial reality/virtual reality platforms, and desktop/web applications collect digital biomarkers.
Challenges
While certain neurological illnesses have clear physical signs, brain abnormalities prevent doctors from relying exclusively on empiric assessments. Clinicians utilize behavioral and psychosocial tests, which vary in specificity and sensitivity, to evaluate an individual’s mood or quantify a patient with schizophrenia’s disrupted mental process.
Excessive subjectivity can be introduced into care through observational or interview-based behavioral assessments. Objective standard measurements in neurology and psychiatry are hard to establish and even more challenging to sustain.
The development of digital biomarkers that continuously record digital and online behavior could lead to more objective assessments of brain illnesses.
Conclusion
The healthcare industry is growing rapidly due to several technological advancements. People often fail to convey their health problems and symptoms to doctors precisely. However, doctors can obtain the history of bodily and behavioral functions with digital biomarkers. Hospitals get a pool of data for research work in case of rare diseases.
