Will wearables revolutionise healthcare? Cardiff Science Festival special
Inside Health
BBC
4.4 • 575 Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2025
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Fitness trackers at the ready! Join James Gallagher at Cardiff Science Festival as he runs through the ways wearable tech is making an impact on health and how it might shape the future of medicines and care. With him are Dr Sanne Lugthart, Haematology consultant at the University Hospital of Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust. She's pioneering using wearables and an app to track pain in people who suffer from sickle cell disease.
Also on the panel is Professor Kathryn Peall who is Personal Chair, Division of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neurosciences at Cardiff University. Kathryn tells James all about working with data from the UK Biobank to test if wearables could predict Parkinson's disease. She's also developing 80s-style headbands that could help take hospital grade sleep monitoring to the comfort of the bedroom. And, running experiments with the audience and on his skydiving assistant Danni, James is also joined by Damian Bailey, Professor of Physiology and Biochemistry from the University of South Wales.
Presenter: James Gallagher Producers: Tom Bonnett and Hannah Robins Production Co-ordinator: Ishmael Soriano Editor: Colin Paterson
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, you're about to listen to a BBC podcast, and I'm Ed Gamble, host of another BBC podcast, |
| 0:05.4 | The Traitors Uncloaked. But my show is available only on BBC Sounds, just like Ellis and John's |
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| 0:27.4 | listen only on BBC Sounds. You're about to listen to Inside Health with me, James Gallagher. |
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| 0:46.7 | Welcome to Cardiff Science Festival. |
| 1:01.1 | So I had a quick look on my phone before I came on stage, and I got up to 14,000 steps on my phone yesterday. |
| 1:13.2 | And that is just a really basic piece of technology, an accelerometer monitoring how many steps I'm doing every day. |
| 1:17.1 | But the technology in wearables is advancing incredibly quickly. |
| 1:20.0 | You can monitor your sleep, your heart rate. |
| 1:21.6 | People are even doing fertility tracking. |
| 1:24.9 | The technology is advancing at incredible pace. |
| 1:29.1 | So what we're going to do on Inside Health today is just explore where the field's going, where it's useful, where it's not, can it really make a difference for the future |
| 1:34.4 | of the NHS? So I've got an amazing panel to go through all of this with you. And we're going to |
| 1:40.2 | start, Professor Damien Bailey from University of South Wales. |
| 1:46.0 | And you're going to do some experiments with us today. |
| 1:47.1 | Get ready for it, James. |
... |
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