With the advent of modern science and technology, Healthcare industry is standing on the edge of complete transformation. The first and foremost challenge for healthcare industry is to improve the service provided along with seamless technology integration in the existing system. The very concept of IoT is futuristic, where without or very little manual intervention, the devices can connect and collaborate with other and work seamlessly by storing, analyzing, monitoring the information shared across through Wi-Fi. Notwithstanding the short tenure since the inception of IoT, it has gained massive traction from the industry leaders. There are numerous areas in healthcare where it can come handy for providing quality services to the patients.
Healthcare domain, by its’ default nature, is quite complicated. It has been quite a gruesome and daunting job to collect all the medical information regarding patients on a frequent basis. IoT can be considered as the game-changer in the scenario. According to the estimates, there will be astounding 26 billion IoT devices by the year 2020 and the total market worth will stand approximately staggering $1.7 trillion dollars.
Proactive Care: Wearable sensors have become a latest fashion trend among the people which not only looks cool but has immense benefit from the medical point of view. It constantly stores and monitors the data and connect through mobile devices on the internet. Many organizations have taken this to the next level for providing smooth and unprecedented healthcare service.
Boston Medical Centre, has initiated IoT in almost every process. Newborn babies are being monitored by security sensors and in case of anomaly, they are taken care of by the nurses who are alerted by the IoT enabled devices. In cases, the newborn babies and provided wristbands to locate them at any time and if they come out of their zone, by getting alerted the exit doors will lock automatically.
Enhanced Patient Care: In addition to that, the biggest challenge for healthcare professional was to manage the elderly people. The IOT Based Health Care System for the Elderly is the latest technology gadget which has come up as a blessing for the patients and specialists. It gives an answer for estimation of body parameters like ECG, Temperature, Moisture, and Heartbeat. It additionally distinguishes the body condition and physical location of the patients. The portable application for the patient and specialists contain an extremely user-friendly GUI Interface for perusing every one of the parameters in the mobile devices to carry it forward in any part of the world.
In addition to that, Florida Hospital Celebration Health has taken healthcare services to another level where patients who undergo surgery are tagged with RTLS ( Real Time Location System) made by Stanley healthcare which monitors the patients from pre-op stage to the post-op stage after surgery and the patients’ family get informed in a continuous basis where they don’t need to depend on doctors or medical staffs anymore to locate their patients.
Enhanced Remote Health: Remote health monitoring system has also garnered a lot of traction in modern days. In this busy schedule of life, people are often far away from their location and to receive the quality care, information needs to traverse with him. Through latest IoT enabled remote health monitoring system, with the detailed and precise information available to the doctors, they can make a thorough prognosis of the for health system of every individual being and recommend the treatment based on the large corpus of detailed, observational real-time data which not only help cure the disease properly but also can be used for preventive medicines and further research in clinical analysis.
For instance, In the Chicago suburb of Lombard, Ill., Health Resource Solutions (HRS), using population health analytics system to analyze the data for patients care and then informing them through mobile application about the health condition and assist them to get quality and real time healthcare service.
Research Purpose: IoT is not being used for improving existing healthcare service but aso for researching new innovations. Researchers are busy with finding more and more innovation and devices for providing seamless heathcare. Through mobile appications and smart sensors, they can not only equip the providers for quality healthcare but also shortening the service time. Few instances are:
Medication Dispensing Device by Philips – It will remind patients of the daily doses, a perfect solution for patients especially elderly people’
Niox Mino by Aerocrine - Checks for presence of Intric Oxide at the time of breathing’
GPS SmartSole: - Shoe tracking device for dementia patients who tend to forget.
It is expected that almost 40% healthcare service providers will equip themselves with IoT-enabled biosensors as IDC predicts by 2019. Keeping all the factors in mind, we must also consider the other side of the coin where the security of the sensitive and confidential medical information is involved. IoT is still at the level of infancy and it will take its due course of time to resolve the security-related concern associated with openly sharing the medical information over the Internet.
Abhijit Chatterjee, a technology connoisseur
