4 Tips to Stay Healthy and Fit This Winter

Winter is just around the corner. During this season, everything and everyone seems to go into hibernation, making it especially challenging for us to stay fit and active. Not only does the cold make you want to sit by your fireplace and drink tonnes of hot chocolate, but the shorter days that come with the season make it harder to squeeze in a workout.
Despite the cold weather, there are many good reasons to keep pumping in the winters to stay healthy and fit. You can simply follow the 4 simple tips below to stay healthy and active this winter.

Bring Fitness Indoors

It is easy to understand why you wouldn’t want to go on your usual morning jog on a cold winter day. Many don’t even bother to go to their own gym, just so they can savour the warmth of their beds for a few extra minutes. All well and good, but this doesn’t mean you cannot stay fit and active indoors. There are plenty of simple yet effective workouts you can do while staying inside your house - whether its yoga, aerobics, strength training, or even HIIT (high intensity interval training). While these are all viable and accessible solutions (Kudos to Youtube), one must be wary about staying indoors for too long during the winters - Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is already a popular phenomenon during this time of the year, and lack of fresh air and socializing can aggravate it.

Take Care of Basic Hygiene

In the winter, we tend to get lazy and ignore self-care. Most of us start to bathe less and overlook the importance of basic hygiene, such as washing our hands. This can increase the chances of developing colds and can weaken our immune system, making us more and more unproductive as workers, students, or simply as members of society. 

Eat Healthy

During this season, we tend to live more on coffee, tea or other hot beverages than on water, disrupting our hydration levels and even our food intake patterns. Try to consume more seasonal fruits and vegetables to get the most out of the season. Vitamin C enriched fruits (such as oranges) are in abundance during this time, so capitalize on your chance to boost your immune system!

Keep Yourself Hydrated

In cold weather, our bodies tend to lose more water due to the dryness in the air. This, coupled with the fact that our thirst for fluids (especially water and juices) decreases in the winters, leads to excessive dehydration, a consequence that is often not realized until it is too late. So, better to set a daily goal and keep track of your daily water consumption - on average, 8-10 glasses of water a day is enough, but this may vary in cold temperatures.

Conclusion

Health and fitness should not be seasonal habits. You don’t have to leave your exercise routine just because the weather is against you. Embrace the cold, enjoy the chilly weather, and make healthy habits a part of your lifestyle until they become second nature.

Top 5 Health Tech Startups to Follow in 2019

The world isn’t getting any younger. According to statistics from the World Health Organization, our population is aging faster than ever before. By 2020, the number of people aged 60 years will outnumber children under the age of 5. This poses a crucial question to humanity: How must health providers care for our aging population with such limited resources (i.e. medical supplies and staff)?

While this question creates an inescapable headache for governments and policy makers, it creates an untapped opportunity for investors and businesses to capitalize on the further rise in demand for healthcare products and services (including healthtech products). Today, we have an array of innovations that are attempting to tackle these gaps by revolutionizing the health-industry with the help of artificial intelligence and blockchain. By breaking away from the traditional treatment-based approach to health and moving toward a prevention-based health model, we have now transitioned to a world where proactive health is the new standard.

Unlike past practices, the healthcare industry is now more open and welcoming to health-tech innovations, owing to the recent tech-boom. Let’s take a look at the top 5 health-tech startups that are disrupting the current healthcare industry.

1) AdhereTech

Location: New York, USA

Niche: We all have trouble with adhering to a prescribed medicine regime. AdhereTech has come up with a smart solution for this! They have developed a smart pill bottle that notifies patients about the time at which they have to take their medicine. The bottle automatically sends an alert notification to the patient’s phone and also monitors his/her dosage and usage patterns. As the name already suggests, this smart bottle analyzes the adherence pattern of the patient. If it notices any non-adherence, it seeks feedback from the patient to help locate the reason for it to resolve it.

2) Playpal

Location: Colorado, USA

Niche: Powered by AI and blockchain, Playpal offers a simple solution to the biggest issue faced by the healthcare industry today: consolidation of large volumes of fragmented health data. Playpal collects your health-stats from your wearable health devices, government databases, and mHealth apps to offer you real-time and customized health recommendations that help you manage your health proactively. That’s not all! Playpal has partnered with the HIECOH Wealth Foundation to introduce a new Health Currency to its users as part of its gamified incentive model. Thanks to Playpal, its users can now earn health tokens for consistently adhering to its recommendations. So, get ready to earn money while living healthy!

3) CliniCloud

Location: California, USA

Niche: CliniCloud has designed a revolutionary interconnected medical kit that can be easily used at home to monitor your vitals. This medical kit works on wireless and non-contact principles. CliniCloud has successfully developed no skin-contact stethoscopes and thermometers. Using these, you can share your vitals with your doctor via cloud without having to be there. CliniCloud allows the doctors to deliver care to far off patients remotely, and is the epitome of convenient care.

4) Calm

Location: California, USA

Niche: Say goodbye to those uneasy nights in which you struggle to get a good night’s sleep. Calm uses a combination of various relaxing and meditation techniques to help you get a sound sleep. By offering a blend of relaxing scenes and calming sounds that help users de-stress. Calm not only improves its users sleep but also boosts their confidence levels and reduces their anxiety.

5) Feel

Location: California, USA

Niche: With increased awareness on the importance of sound mental health, more and more health-tech startups are focusing on building this aspect of the health industry. One such example is Feel, a wristband that tracks user’s emotional wellbeing and monitors biosignals in order to provide personal recommendations that improve mental health and emotion-regulation.

The Top 5 startups above make it evident that technology has vastly changed the structure of the healthcare industry. From revolutionary ideas like Playpal to innovative solutions like Feel, healthcare and health management is (without a doubt) on the heels of historic technological breakthroughs. New advancements have brought forward better healthcare delivery, advanced medical devices, more effective treatment plans, and proactive preventive care. We now live in an exciting time when corporations, government & institutions, and startups can collaborate to transform the existing systems across industries!