Mobile applications have made our lives easier & better, even though sometimes lazy. However, when we talk about fitness and health tracking applications, they seem to be definitely helping us change the way we look at our mental and physical health data. Back when smartphones and such apps didn’t exist, we could only measure our body weight using an analog weighing scale which had a lot of anomalies. Weighing scales were the only way to keep a track on how healthy your lifestyle is and how is it affecting you, unlike current healthcare apps that allow you to measure the number of calories burnt or the number of steps walked or heart rate. This physical data is collected by various sensors that show it to us in a simple & engaging format. The analysis then prods us to lose weight, gain muscle or to maintain an overall healthy lifestyle.

Let us understand what enables the mobile apps to keep a close tab on your health parameters:

Motion Trackers

All modern fitness gadgets and wearables are stacked with motion trackers in the form of accelerometers, gyroscopes, and compasses. A gyroscope is a device that uses earth’s gravity to help determine the orientation of an object in space; a compass determines cardinal direction, and an accelerometer is designed to measure acceleration. Motion trackers can be used to measure walking, running, cycling and swimming activities. These trackers can then calculate speed, cadence, distance traveled and calories burnt using the data collected.

Optical Heart Rate Monitors

Optical heart rate monitors use LED sensors to track changes in blood saturation by passing light through the skin in specific places like the wrist, fingers, and forehead. As a result, heart rate monitors obtain a Photoplethysmogram(PPG) that allows the monitor’s processor to determine the heart rate and the cardiac cycle of the user.

Bioimpedance Sensors

Bioimpedance sensors measure the resistance of the body tissue to small amounts of electric current to enable the capture of a wide range of physiological signals including heart rate, respiration rate, and galvanic skin response.

These apps seem to be capable of capturing a lot of data, but what’s more pertinent is where and how this data can be used. The data can be used not only for keeping track of your health but can also be shared with the medical community such as doctors and insurance providers to help you identify the perfect health insurance or get the best treatment for yourself.

NHCT app is a unique and value-based healthcare app that utilizes the data collected by fitness gadgets & apps like Google Fit, Apple Health Kit et al to help you take better care of your health.

Let’s understand how this app actually works.

Once you install the app, the user is prompted to provide self-reported information like body weight, body mass index(BMI), waist to hip ratio, blood sugar levels, and blood pressure. The user can also add her previous prescription data, like, the date you last visited the doctor, name of the hospital/clinic, lab reports.

This data can then be used to keep a track of the users' health and to provide managed care for any possible non-communicable diseases like diabetes, blood pressure, and obesity. The user can also book an appointment with a doctor and order lab tests right at her doorstep through our trained “health coaches”. Through the NHCT app, the doctors can get a holistic picture of the patient’s medical history resulting in better treatment and diagnosis.

One very important feature of the app is that the users get incentivized for staying fit and accurately self-reporting their health data.

NHCT app uses tokens to help users lead a healthy life. It works on a three-tier token system:

Wawa Token can be earned by making healthy choices and recording your activities. Warma Token can be earned when activities are verified by others — like a marathon or a football game. NHCT Token can be earned by uploading clinically verified data like medical reports. NHCT can then be used to pay doctors, insurers or even gym membership fee.

No one knows what the future holds and what circumstances we might be in, but, we can definitely take control of our health today. By using health and fitness trackers, we can keep a tab on how our vitals are behaving, and if a reason for doubt arises we know that a doctor is just a click away with NHCT.