Ghandi once said – “It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.”

Now consider the current relationship you have with your doctor.

You step into their clinic (provided you are healthy) once every few months for a check up, wait in a characterless room and stare blankly at niche magazines from this time last year. The child next to you, crying. The man next to you, coughing.

All this for 20 minutes of their time, to pull up outdated medical details that have sat unaltered since your last visit.

Of course these cite the most important aspects of your health – things like allergies and past visits and reasons why. However the problem here is that they remain unchanged when you aren’t sat in that room.

Your Doctor won’t know that you were feeling slightly under the weather last week. That you had a particularly stressful day last Tuesday, or that you’re diet hasn’t been as good as it usually is. And that actually, these events have combined to cause the symptoms you are feeling right now.

It stresses that health monitoring isn’t something that should freeze in time. Rather it constantly changes, interacting and influencing – and it is time that it was kept track of ubiquitously, by everyone.

Businesses are emerging to ride this wave. Creating technologies that make it simpler than ever to gather and analyse personal data. Sensors have shrunk and become more affordable. Accelerometers, once luxuries are now cheap and small enough to be routinely included in smartphones. Making it easier to take quantitative methods once the exclusive domain science and business, and instead apply them to the personal sphere.

Here to discuss 21^st century health monitoring is Cedric Hutchings. CEO of wearable company Withings.

For more on health monitoring, take a listen to this weeks episode above.