Continuous glucose monitors

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC, 2023) explains that under the NHS Constitution ‘you can make a significant contribution to your own, and your family's, good health and wellbeing, and take personal responsibility for it.’ And in a survey of Swedish GPs, Björk et al (2021) reported that being responsible for your health ‘may further mean that you own your health problem, take active measures to keep and improve your health, accept help in health and/or that you do not offload all responsibility onto your GP.’

A recent innovation enabling individuals to exercise responsibility for their own health is the application of mobile telephony systems that facilitate certain physiological measurements to be recorded and shared. For example, the British Heart Foundation (BHF, 2024) considers smartphone and wearable data to have ‘huge potential to contribute to cardiovascular research and healthcare’ and the BHF's Data Science Centre aims to establish a prospective, large-scale smartphone and wearable dataset linked with participants' NHS data. A survey of 194 health professionals and members of the public revealed a range of parameters they would be happy to share, with some suggestions from the public ‘for active data, including diet, alcohol use, blood glucose, free text comments and timing of medications’ (BHF, 2024).