One of the most important factors that influence your health is your physical activity. Exercise and sports have proven positive effects on body and mind, which can help you prevent diseases and increase your well-being. In addition, there are of course a lot of peripheral factors that help determine which specific activities are feasible. Consider available time, living environment, nutrition, age, (chronic) diseases, allergies, and so on.
Make better use of health data
Exercise and sports have already acquired a strong data component in recent years, with activity trackers, sports watches, heart rate monitors and of course all associated apps. Being able to measure your own progress and share or compare it with others is often an additional motivator for sporting performance.
In addition, there are now more and more other health data that have become easier to measure. Smart scales, real-time blood sugar monitoring, full body composition scans, detailed insights into cardiovascular status, and so on.
So a lot of data that could be combined and analyzed to discover connections and provide better preventive health advice. But there are still many obstacles to taking the philosophy of 'measuring is knowing' to a higher or more integrated level. Much of this data is locked in silos and there is no good way to work with it outside of the app or platform. Could that be different?
Certainly! Under the banner 'Manage My Health', Athumi works on innovative applications to do more with available data, in collaboration with Energy Lab, We Are and the Flemish Department of Healthcare.
A look at the future during FTI
You can soon discover what these innovative solutions could look like during the Flanders Technology & Innovation Festival. From March 15 to 24, 2024, technology and innovation will be put in the spotlight everywhere in Flanders from a positive vision of the future. On March 20 and 21, the Winter Circus in Ghent will be the location of The Summit, a two-day conference on health and (bio)technology, organized by FTI Ghent.
It is there that Athumi contributes to an interactive experience around prevention, health and data. Our partner Energy Lab will have 100 people perform an Energy Scan on site to collect data about fitness and biological age.
How can this be put into practice in the future with the help of the Athumi Pod? See 3 examples of what a Manage My Health future could look like:
Example 1: personalized advice for a healthier life
You take an Energy Scan at Energy Lab and complete a health questionnaire. A sports and nutrition schedule is drawn up on this basis. Information from Vitalink - such as a food allergy schedule - is added to this to create a personal health profile.
This data is shared smartly (and securely) with a supermarket or meal box provider in order to offer the right food products at the right price, taking into account the nutritional plan drawn up, personal preferences (such as veggie or vegan), and allergies and intolerances.
Example 2: better medical services
When you can give medical professionals such as your GP or specialist a more complete and accurate picture of relevant aspects of your life, it becomes easier for them to provide better (preventive) advice. Just think of targeted sports and exercise advice based on self-collected data or insights from specific sports tests. But identifying the risks of type 2 diabetes more quickly or preventing cardiovascular disease more efficiently are also possible.
Example 3: contributing to the general interest and better prevention
The safety and control that is ingrained in the Athumi Pod not only has an impact on an individual level. Since it becomes possible to share specific data anonymously, citizens (who wish) can participate in large-scale population studies conducted by academic or government institutions. By participating in such a data-driven prevention study, you contribute in an accessible way to the Flemish Health Data Space, an initiative with a lot of (health) potential.
An important pillar of this ecosystem is the ZorgAtlas, a powerful data sharing platform for (government) data on health and well-being. By working with detailed datasets from large groups of people, researchers can uncover new insights that ultimately lead to better recommendations for living a healthy and fit life for longer.