Wearables are starting to pop up everywhere in medicine — except, perhaps, actual clinical settings. Even a staid organization like the American Psychiatric Association had some on hand at its 168th (!) annual meeting this week in Toronto, a city very much not American by the most widely used definition.

In this video, produced by WebsEdge/Health for the APA, Dr. Arshya Vahabzadeh, a fellow in child psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an autism researcher at Harvard Medical School, briefly shows off the Apple Watch and the Muse brain-sensing headset. Then he goes into a discussion of the potential of wearables.

“People are collecting a lot of rich data about themselves, about their sleep, about their behavior, about what they do on a day-to-day basis,” Vahabzadeh said. “We know that behavior contributes to great burden for our medical costs, especially for chronic health conditions.”

Psychiatrists are the “medical leaders of the mind, brain and body,” according to Vahabzadeh. “I think we need to understand more and explore more about how these wearable devices and the quantitative, rich data that they collect can be used to help guide our understanding of our patients’ behavior and mental health,” he said.

“We’re seeing that our patients are moving in general across medicine from just being patients to being active, engaged consumers. They’re generating data about their own bodies that we as physicians need to use and understand what that data means, help us develop insights into their behavior and health and then identify actionable processes that we can use to help improve their overall well-being,” Vahabzadeh continued.

Just when I was getting ready to scrutinize these remarks for overstating the consumer acceptance of wearables in healthcare today, Vahabzadeh offered this reality check: “It might not be tomorrow. It might not be next week. But gradually we are going to see more people wear smart devices all over their body.”

Image: YouTube user WebsEdgeHealth