A New World of Healthy Design–That You Wear
Jul 6, 2015, 10:32 AM, Posted by Sheree Crute
Wearable technologies have the power to make communicating with health care providers seamless and easy—opening up a new frontier for data tracking and treatment.
Gary Wellman is living the dream. Every morning, he is treated to the nearly cloudless sky that frames Arizona’s nearby Santa Rita Mountains. A retired basketball coach, 72-year-old Wellman happily shares that he “lives on a golf course in Green Valley,” and likes to keep busy. “You can’t sit around when you have arthritis and diabetes like I do.”
About a year ago, Wellman hopped out of his golf cart, stood up to reach for his clubs and found himself on the ground. He suffered from numbness in his feet, a common symptom of diabetes. After that day, Wellman says, “I began to fall a lot on the course. My doctors did all kinds of tests and came up with nothing.”
That is until Wellman’s physician suggested he participate in an experimental treatment for loss of balance conducted in the lab of Bijan Najafi, PhD, a surgeon and director of the Interdisciplinary Consortium on Advanced Motion Performance at the University of Arizona.