The Rise of Wearable Technology in Health Care

The thoughtful study on wearable activity monitors by Daskivich et al 1 for the first time to date addresses a long-standing paradox. Physicians have known forever that ambulatory status matters and represents a high value toward successful outcomes, with attendant reductions in complications and lengths of stay. Despite that value, we have historically relied on notoriously poor metrics to assess ambulatory status and fitness and done little in the way of structured "prehabilitation" before elective surgery.