Do you know: Wearable devices can detect and predict inflammatory bowel disease flare-ups
in 2025
Wearable devices can identify, differentiate and predict flare-ups, or the worsening of symptoms and inflammation, in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), Mount Sinai researchers have shown in a first-of-its-kind study.
The results, published in the journal Gastroenterology on January 16, revealed that wearable technology can predict the development of subsequent flares in IBD, enabling continuous disease monitoring through widely available commercial devices.
“Current disease monitoring methods rely on patients interacting directly with their doctors, through office visits, a blood or stool test, or a colonoscopy. These methods only assess the disease at one time, and are they are often invasive or difficult,” said first author Robert Hirten, MD, Clinical Director of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health; and Associate Professor of Medicine (Gastroenterology), and Artificial Intelligence and Human Health, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “Our study shows that commonly used wearable devices such as Apple Watches, Fitbits, and Oura Rings can be effective tools for monitoring chronic inflammatory diseases such as IBD. This creates an opportunity to monitor the disease remotely outside the healthcare setting, in a continuous manner, and possibly in real time.”
IBD is a chronic condition that causes inflammation of the intestines and affects more than 2.4 million people in the United States. Mount Sinai researchers enrolled more than 300 participants with ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease, the two main types of IBD, from 36 states. Participants wore devices, answered daily symptom surveys, and provided blood and stool assessments of inflammation.
????The researchers found that there was a significant change in circadian patterns of heart rate variability (a marker of nervous system function), as well as heart rate, oxygenation, and daily activity, all measured by wearable devices, when inflammation or symptoms present. Moreover, these physiological markers could detect inflammation even in the absence of symptoms and distinguish whether the symptoms were driven by active inflammation in the intestines. Importantly, the researchers found that these metrics measured by wearables changed up to seven weeks before flare-ups occurred.
The researchers are applying similar approaches to other chronic inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, and are leveraging artificial intelligence to develop algorithms using wearable device data to predict flares on an individual basis. “These results open the door to leveraging wearable technology for health monitoring and disease management in innovative ways we hadn’t thought of before,” said Dr. Hirten. “It is our hope that, in the future, this approach will greatly improve the quality of life of our patients.”