Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) communicate information from your wearable devices back to medical servers, app manufacturers, and your home computer.

Sensors operate inside devices that monitor your heart rate or oxygen level, collect data, send it back to a central hub (most often, your smartphone), and then relay the information to a medical team or healthcare monitoring service.

There are many benefits: Rather than moving into an assisted living facility or spending a lot of time in the hospital, patients can live at home and receive virtual care. Cloud-based systems allow for the continuous transmission of your data and real-time analysis for issues like chronic disease (hypertension, high blood pressure, asthma).

This trend is still in very early stages and will accelerate as 5G networks proliferate, because a more advanced network will lead to less lag and could help secure personal data.