Hi-tech devices become "smart" assistants for people's health

Photo taken on Dec. 18, 2021 shows a senior citizen is showing his smart bracelet provided by the local government in Hefei, east China's Anhui Province. (Xinhua/Xu Yong)

BEIJING, Dec. 28 (Xinhua) -- With the popularization of cutting-edge technologies, smart health devices such as fitness mirrors, smart bracelets, and smart body-weight scales have become popular with the public, contributing to people's health.

The annual health consumption of most of China's families in 2021 ranged from 500 yuan (about 72 U.S. dollars) to 5,000 yuan, and people are more willing to pay for health, according to a study report on health consumption.

In recent years, more people preferred at-home workouts. Fitness mirrors are increasingly favored because they allow people to use fragmented time at home to exercise. Data from the research firm iResearch shows that the market size of fitness mirrors reached 30 million yuan in 2021.

"To put it simply, the fitness mirror captures the movement track of the human body through the camera and guides the movement posture for the exerciser in real time. It can provide users with an immersive fitness experience via the gamified interactive fitness course module," said Meng Lin, a director assistant at the Medical College of Tianjin University.

Compared with other video fitness courses, the advantage of the fitness mirror lies in its real-time interaction and error-correcting ability, which largely depends on the AI motion recognition and interaction algorithm inside the product.

The built-in camera of the fitness mirror can capture the bone points of the human body through image processing, establish the movement model of the human bone, and realize real-time tracking of the joint posture to guide and correct the movements.

Under the Internet of Everything, all kinds of smart sports wearable devices will completely change traditional fitness scenes and the consumption behavior of the sporting goods market, said Luo Jie, an official with the China Sporting Goods Federation.

Nowadays, smart bracelets have become commonplace accessories for many people. They use them to monitor blood pressure, blood oxygen, and heart rate.

Every morning, Rong Zhengbang, 82, who lives in Mazu Village, Zhoushan City in east China's Zhejiang Province, uses his smart bracelet provided by the local civil affairs bureau to test his blood pressure and heart rate.

The bracelet then automatically transmits data to the information platform so that his family, doctors, and community workers can know his health data in real time.

The smart bracelet is not only a "protector" of the elderly but also a "fitness assistant." It can monitor the changes in health indicators during exercise, helping people avoid the harm caused by exercise and providing them with references for making exercise plans.

"These functions are achieved mainly by photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors, also used in biomedical detection," said Li Shuang, a lecturer at the Medical College of Tianjin University.

Li noted that the smart bracelet is an electronic product rather than a medical instrument, and its monitoring accuracy is not as good as that of professional instruments. Its measurement results are only for reference.