The dawn of IoT in healthcare and IoT medical devices
Before the Internet of Things had fairly set in, patients’ interactions with doctors were merely restricted to personal visits, appointment dates, phone calls, and text communications.
There was practically no viable way doctors or hospitals could possibly think to monitor their patients’ health continuously and make recommendations in accordance.
The emergence of (IoT)-enabled devices have made remote monitoring in the healthcare sector possible, unleashing the potential to keep patients safe and healthy round the clock, empowering physicians to deliver a superlative form of care. It has also increased patient engagement and overall satisfaction as interactions with doctors have become further easier and more convenient.
Remote monitoring of a patient’s health helps in reducing the length of hospital stays and prevents frequent readmissions. IoT also has a major impact on potentially reducing healthcare costs significantly and significantly improving treatment outcomes.
IoT is transforming the healthcare industry by constantly redefining the space of devices and people interactions in delivering superior healthcare solutions. IoT applications in healthcare benefits patients, families, physicians, hospitals, and insurance companies altogether.
IoT designed for Patients – Devices like wearables, fitness bands and other wirelessly connected devices like blood pressure monitor patches and heart rate monitoring cuffs, glucometer stick-Ons etc. give patients access to personalized attention and self-care. These medical IOT devices can be tuned to remind daily calorie count, remind exercise checks, and appointments, signal blood pressure variations, and much more.
IoT has changed people’s lives, especially elderly patients, by enabling constant tracking of chronic health conditions. This has a major impact on solo agers living alone and their extended families. On any instance of an emergency or changes in the routine activities of a patient, an instant in-built alert mechanism sends signals to respective family members and informs concerned healthcare providers.
IoT designed for Doctors –
By using wearables and other home monitoring equipment embedded with IoT systems, physicians can keep track of patients’ daily health more effectively. They can track patients’ adherence to daily treatment plans or preempt any need for immediate medical attention. IoT enables healthcare professionals to be more proactive and connect with patients quite inseparably. Data collected from IoT devices can help physicians identify the best treatment plans for patients and reach the expected outcomes faster.
IoT designed for Hospitals –
Apart from monitoring patients’ health and vitals, there are many other areas where IoT devices are very proven useful in hospitals. IoT devices tagged with sensors are specifically used for tracking real time location and units of medical equipment like wheelchairs, defibrillators, nebulizers, oxygen pumps and other monitoring equipment. Deployment of medical staff like nurses and warden managers at different locations can also be analyzed in real time.
The spread of inbound infections is a major concern for patients in hospitals. IoT-enabled hygiene monitoring devices help in preventing patients from getting internally re-infected. IoT devices also help in asset management facilities like pharmacy inventory controls, and environmental monitoring, for example, checking in refrigerator temperatures, and humidity controls for stored medications.
IoT designed for Health Insurers –
There are numerous opportunities for health insurers to deploy IoT-connected intelligent devices. Insurance companies can leverage collected patient data captured through health monitoring devices for their internal underwritings and claims operations. This enables detecting fraud claims and identifying prospects for underwritings. IoT devices bring transparency between insurers and customers in terms of underwriting, pricing, claims handling, and the entire risk assessment processes. In the light of IoT-captured data-driven decisions, all operation processes will provide adequate visibility into customers’ underlying thought behind every decision made and process outcomes for the better.
Insurers can even offer incentives to their customers for using and sharing health data generated through IoT devices. They can even reward customers for using IoT devices to keep track of their routine activities and check-in adherence to treatment plans and follow ups of precautionary health measures. This data can potentially help insurers to reduce claims quite significantly. IoT devices can also enable insurance companies to validate claims via the daily patient data captured by these devices.
Redefining the future of Healthcare using IoT medical devices
The frequent proliferation of healthcare-specific IoT products and medical device development has potentially opened up immense opportunities. And the amount of data generated by these connected devices holds the incredible potential to transform healthcare altogether.
IoT In Medtech
IoT has a simple 3-step architecture that are basically stages in successfully completing a process
All 3 stages are inter-connected and data captured or processed at every stage yields added value to the next stage. Integrated values in the process bring futuristic intuitions and delivers some dynamic business prospects.
Step 1: Consists of deployment of interconnected devices including sensors, actuators, monitors, detectors, camera systems etc. These devices collect data.
Step 2: Data received from sensors and other devices in analog form, are aggregated/converted digitally for further processing.
Step 3: Once the data is digitized and aggregated, it’s pre-processed, standardized and moved to data centers or the Cloud. The Final processed data is managed and analyzed further at the required level. Deploying Advanced Analytics, when further applied to this collected data, brings forth actionable business insights for effective future decision-making.
IoT is surely redefining healthcare by ensuring better care, improving treatment outcomes and potentially reducing costs for patients, with better process management and workflows, improved healthcare providers performance and the overall patient experience.
What IoT can further do for healthcare?
Economize/Lower Costs:
IoT enables patient monitoring in real time, significantly cutting down unnecessary visits to doctors, hospital stays and frequent readmissions
Better Treatments:
Enabling physicians to take evidence-based informed decisions and bringing absolute clarity & transparency
Speed up Disease Diagnosis:
Continuous patient monitoring and real time data helps in faster diagnosing diseases at an early stage or even before the disease development phase based on prior recorded symptoms.
Proactive Treatment Plans:
Continuous health monitoring opens the doors for providing proactive medical treatment plans for doctors.
Drugs and Equipment Facility Management:
Management of medication, drugs and other medical equipment is a major challenge in the healthcare industry. Via connected devices, these can be managed and utilized efficiently with less incurred costs
Error Reduction:
Data generated through IoT devices not only help in effective decision making but also ensure smooth healthcare operations with reduced chances of errors, and wastage of resources and further system costs.
Healthcare IoT is not entirely without challenges. IoT-enabled connected devices daily capture huge amounts of data, including personal sensitive information, giving rise to concerns about patient data security.
Implementing high security measures is crucial. As IoT explores new dimensions of patient care via real-time monitoring and access to patients’ vitals. This data is a practical goldmine for healthcare stakeholders to further improve upon their patient’s overall health and services experience while increasing revenue opportunities and improving standard healthcare operations. Prepared to harness healthcare and digital power would prove to be the differentiator in the increasingly IoT dominant & connected future world.
About Technosphere
Technosphere designs smart IoT products and industry specific IoT solutions including IoT connectivity solutions. powered by deploying enhanced IT. Offering seamless system integration, machine learning, sensors and embedded technologies to help improve any businesses across multiple verticals. to generate growth, retain stability and competition. It’s reliable and secure data aggregation and seamless cloud connectivity helps support IoT data analysis and utilization ready for any successful product implementations and IoT retail applications.
Incorporated in 2013 , Technosphere has offices based in Bangalore, India and Dallas, USA. It is promoted by industry leaders in electronics and product development engineering and has a successful industry record of developing IoT products and solutions.