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IBM’s wearable tech monitors your health by checking your hand strength

IBM Smart tech

IBM has created what it describes as a “first-of-a-kind” fingernail sensor prototype, designed to measure how your fingernails bend and move throughout the day. On the face of it, that might sound pointless. In fact, it serves as an impressively accurate measure of grip strength. This, in turn, can be an indicator of various medical conditions. By gathering this data and using algorithms to parse it, changes can be monitored over time and potentially used to alert clinicians of health concerns.

“It’s designed to capture everyday movement by people in their daily lives — whether they are at home, outside, or in a car,” Ajay Royyuru, vice president of healthcare and life sciences research at IBM, told Digital Trends. “It’s lightweight, wireless, and unobtrusive. We have a team working to get the device even smaller, so that it is just a speck on your fingertip. [Research] looking at grip strength has revealed insights into chronic conditions such as schizophrenia and Parkinson’s Disease. In one cardiovascular disease study, reduced grip strength was a better predictor of death than blood pressure.”