Walk, talk, think, see and feel: harnessing the power of digital biomarkers in healthcare
Dylan Powell
Abstract
A key pillar of healthcare’s journey towards precision medicine has been the proliferation and development of biomarkers to detect, monitor and manage disease. Over the last fifty years, healthcare has seen a rapid acceleration in the discovery of traditional biomarkers for a variety of conditions, including cancer, namely Carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), and in the 1980s, CA15-3 for breast cancer 1 (Fig. 1 ). Fig. 1: Defining biomarkers with a suggested definition for a digital biomarker ‘fingerprint’. Parts of this figure utilises photos from Stirling University Brand Bank ( https://www.stir.ac.uk/brand-bank/visual-assets/ ) all licensed under CC BY-SA. Full size image Biomarkers remain a crucial source of data and insight for early detection and diagnosis, assessing the response of treatment and prognosis 1 , 2 . However, with both the complexity and increasing demands for healthcare, research is increasingly exporting novel opportunities that augment and build upon traditional biomarker approaches 2 , 3 .