Receiving a chat group sharing of our FiTSA team MOU signing with GEA Institute posted on our social media, triggered me to write this blog on how technology can help individuals promote a “Healthy Lifestyle”.

Everyone carries a Smartphone. As I shared with you on an earlier blog, “Smartphone dominates the world”, there is a lot of content developers creating mobile apps, for a variety of functions and purposes, including health monitoring apps and platforms. If you happen to search around in Smartphone App Store, you will surely find interesting health apps such as running, walking or even sleeping apps. For example, sleeping apps that can help you to track your sleeping habit and also provide you with detailed and actionable information about your sleep. This data can help you make the right decisions and improve your sleeping habit and the quality of your sleep before you call it a night.

We are now in a digital era where Smartphone has dominated the world. The health sector has evolved into a new era of digital health technologies that not only offer consumer friendly features, but also creating and producing greater apps experiences with deeper understanding of our body condition. This had made it easy for all of us to adapt healthy lifestyles or behaviors by empowering us, to manage our own health, bypassing the traditional needs of visiting a healthcare professional.

Through this type of “empowerment and self-regulation”, day to day activities are being tracked by the wearable technology. We can change and cultivate healthier lifestyles by taking more preventive measures. With this, we are now able to significantly reduce the prevalence of diseases such as diabetes type 2 and making less pressure on health service worldwide.

I owned an Apple Watch. The two apps which I use frequently are activities and heartbeat apps. A quick run-down, activities apps keep track of my walking and running activities and synchronize back to my iPhone for analysis. As for heartbeat, I use it for monitoring my heartbeat rate to ensure that I’m normal. These apps act as my reminders, to stay healthy so I can live a long life to look after my family.

Well, if you like others, you can have alternatives wearable as gadgets. As part of “Smart Nation Singapore” initiatives, you can get free gadgets by participating in “National Steps Challenge™”. The idea is simple, receive Steps Tracker, pair with mobile apps and start to track. The benefit is simple: Through the use of wearable technology and simple data analytics, you will receive feedback on your daily progress and also earned rewards upon achieving certain milestones set within the apps. I believed, it is a win-win situation.

With all these data accumulated over time, there are now platforms which are able to analysis and combine results, to provide and give recommendations for preventive or pre-treatment health issues. This might be the future for healthcare, where evolution begin to take place and the key behind this is to engage every one of us, with our own health and empowering each, to take control and become self-accountable.

Rule of thumb: Exercise, is the best medicine in the world!

Jack Leo, Technical Manager
Homeland Security