Introduction

Welcome to the fourth course in the AI for Healthcare Nanodegree. In this course, we're going to talk about data that comes from wearable devices and techniques to process that data.

About Your Instructor

My name is Nikhil. I've spent the past five years working with wearables at Verily Life Sciences, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. I’ve worked across various healthcare domains from cardiovascular disease to neurodegenerative diseases and diabetes, and I’m really excited to be teaching this course. I hope you’re excited to be here too!

Why Wearables

Wearables have been around for a long time as fitness devices. Fitbit's first wrist wearable came out in 2009. But before that, there were chest straps for measuring your heart rate and hip devices for counting steps.

More recently, wearables are starting to be used in making medical decisions and for clinical research. For example, in this ABC news article, a young woman discovered she had kidney failure by following clues from her Apple Watch.

This story highlights all the advantages of wearable devices. They can monitor people continuously and unobtrusively and discover intermittent abnormalities that point to serious medical conditions before they progress. And in this case, they alerted this woman of her condition before she developed symptoms that might have put her in the hospital.