Advancing perioperative care with digital applications and wearables
Ben Li, Arjun Mahajan, Dylan Powell
Abstract
Digital biomarkers are quantifiable measures collected from digital health technologies that may act as indicators of biological processes 1 . The rapid increase in real-time health information collected from wearable devices has allowed digital biomarkers to emerge as a promising tool to support the diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of various health conditions 1 . While digital biomarkers have broad applications in health care, their utilization in perioperative medicine represents an emerging area of study, practice development, and implementation science 1 . A discussion of the potential applications of digital biomarkers in perioperative care may be informative to surgeons, anesthesiologists, and other clinicians involved in caring for patients undergoing surgery. This is particularly relevant given multiple recent publications on digital biomarkers in perioperative care 2 , 3 , 4 . In this article, we discuss the potential role of digital biomarkers in the pre-operative, in-hospital, and post-operative phases of care to improve patient outcomes (Fig. 1 ).