Digital innovations that push your health

Health is the most important thing in life. Although most people would agree with this, far too few still take adequate preventive and precautionary care. Men in particular tend to be reluctant when it comes to preventive care. What prevents them from taking advantage of examinations and integrating preventive measures into their everyday lives is often a lack of time, in addition to ignorance of the wide range of preventive examinations available.

What if prevention were as convenient as online banking and as entertaining as smartphone games? That's exactly what numerous apps and platforms are already aiming to do, catapulting prevention into the digital age. Your advantage: fitness apps, online courses and wearables are all geared to you - they don't care if you don't want to do anything for your health until the end of a long working day and would rather not leave your apartment for your late workout.

A study commissioned by the German Federal Ministry of Health describes such offerings as ePrevention - meaning apps and other offerings that support health-promoting behavior across spatial and temporal boundaries on the one hand and use modern tracking technologies via smartphone or wearable on the other. Because if your nutrition or fitness coach is based on an algorithm, it must be fed with information that provides information about your progress.

What's the reason? According to researchers at the Queensland University of Technology, indirect health impulses are much more effective for people who are not yet thinking specifically about promoting their health more. On the other hand, people who want to lose weight, become more athletic, or who struggle with allergies, for example, are more open to apps that specifically address the topic of health.

App variety for the health-conscious

Almost all people have given up their Pokémon career. But if you want to take conscious care of your health as easily, you can choose from a wide range of digital applications and electronic devices. It doesn't matter whether you want to prevent burnout, improve your fitness, or make your life easier with hay fever - as the following three innovations prove.

Burnout prophylaxis

A healthy body needs a healthy mind. With all the stress in everyday life, it is therefore important to promote not only physical fitness, but also mental fitness. Many offers in this area aim at recognizing one's own stress level and reducing it to a healthy level. Brainboost, for example, uses neurofeedback and EEG currents to do this. And Bodyviser uses psychological and physiological data to measure your stress level and connect you with suitable experts who can support you with coaching, for example.

Progress at the desk

Are you still sitting or already standing in the office? Luckily, height-adjustable desks can be seen in more and more offices. But that's not enough for the founders of Wolkolution: they've developed a kind of silent and sustainably built treadmill for the office. The futuristic-looking device is designed to improve fitness and prevent typical postural damage that comes from sitting too much at a desk. In combination with a digital platform like Virgin Pulse offers for companies, a convenient incentive is created for employees to do something for their body in the office as well.

Have a nose full less often

You have hay fever and don't want to be restricted by it? People who suffer from allergies in Bavaria can breathe a sigh of relief thanks to the electronic pollen information network, or ePin for short. The world's first fully automatic pollen information network, developed by the Technical University of Munich, shows with a delay of just four hours how many and which pollen are currently buzzing around in the air. So if you live in Bavaria, you can plan your daily routine and your intake of antihistamines much more precisely.

How effective are digital health supporters?

We can say that people who have not yet paid much attention to prevention and health promotion are best introduced to these topics with playful apps. Anyone who wants to consciously do something for their own health already has a good selection of options. Digital health programs are also helpful for people with chronic complaints, such as allergies, migraines, or diabetes.

A small success story in connection with diabetes comes from Austria: A recent study has shown that digital diabetes prevention can indeed work. According to the study, a digital health program can help people lose weight and prevent diabetes. The study participants used an app from the pharmaceutical company Roche and an online portal that connected them with their doctor.

Users were six times more likely to lose at least 5% of their body weight than people without digital support. Participants who used the digital program for a year were able to reduce their weight by an average of 8.4 kg and their BMI by almost three points. If that's not motivation enough to give digital helpers a chance.