Consumer Health Care: Current Trends in Consumer Health Monitoring

The term health care has a very wide scope that ranges from lifestyle and wellness to care for acute conditions. With the availability of digital accessories for monitoring basic biological functions, the potential for obtaining detailed data on the lifestyle, habits, and behavior of an individual exists. Such data can enable the diagnosis of the causes for a condition with higher accuracy. Recently, a large number of devices have become available on the market that can monitor various aspects of lifestyle and biological functions. Such data provide feedback to an individual for compliance with healthy guidelines as well as contributing information to the health-care provider for use in the diagnosis of an ailment. In this article, we identify the various aspects of care that can benefit from consumer-grade health-monitoring devices and present the overall landscape in the context of self-care. We qualify the term consumer health care, assigning the context to it and identifying the services available in that context.