IoT is presenting huge opportunities for the healthcare industry. It facilitates solutions for patients, physicians, and hospitals and is expected to develop at a great pace in the upcoming years. From the devices that patients can wear such as fitness bands, glucometers, blood pressure wirelessly connected devices to much more sophisticated solutions.
Wearable Offering Huge Upgrades For The Patients
While such inventions may appear as trivial, they offer a large upgrade for patients, especially elderly patients that can be more independent due to the constant tracking of their health and the possibility of these devices connecting family members and health providers.
The Use Of Wearables For Physicians
Wearables can also be quite useful for physicians, which can be more efficient in tracking the help of their patients and react to any need for immediate medical attention. The treatment process can also be made easier through the data collection that the IoT enables.
Advantages Of Wearable IoT Devices
There are several important advantages such as possible cost reductions, evidence-based and highly transparent decisions in treatment, faster diagnosis, better monitoring, and the limitation of errors as the data generated through the IoT devices facilitates smoother operations.
Possible Uses Of IoT In The Healthcare Industry
There is a myriad of possible uses of IoT in the healthcare industry that goes well beyond the wearables. The gigantic potential that IoT shows in the healthcare industry can be furtherly illustrated by the growing interest of the giant companies in developing products that can be applied in the healthcare industry, or acquiring startups that do. One of the best examples is Apple that continued to upgrade its medical features in Apple Watch Series. From menstrual tracking to FDA-approved EKG, and an oxygen sensor in the newly released Apple Watch 6 series. Similarly, as reported by Business Insider, Microsoft has built a cloud factor that facilitates the cloud-based delivery of multiple healthcare services.
Smart Hospital
The absurd long waiting times are a long-standing issue in most countries. The Covid-19 pandemic has made it evident that medical care must be more quickly available. Smart Hospital can facilitate it as it works as a full-fledged virtual hospital. It can read and analyze more than 20 different types of data, from oxygen level to motion features. Based on this analytics, it can choose the most efficient treatment method.
Amiko
Amiko is an IoT solution smart respirator dedicated to patients with lung diseases. Its competitive advantage lays in the ability to collect a huge amount of data on the person’s breathing patterns that are subsequently analyzed and sent to the doctor. As the features are largely customized, the doctors can monitor their patients and adjust the treatment without even seeing the person, purely based on the data sent by the Amiko device.
RapidSOS
RapidSOS is an IoT application that is genius in its simplicity. It is a seemingly trivial app where you can build your health-profile but it can end up saving your life. You can connect the app to the wearables, your car, or even your home security system. If you are in need of immediate medical attention and call emergency services, they will see all the key data immediately. Thus, you will save precious time by not having to explain your location, name, blood group, and other key information.
Thync
Last but not least, comes a startup that offers solutions for mental health. Fundamentally important and unfortunately, commonly undermined area of our life. Psychiatry and normalizing mental health is still in its infancy in many areas in the world. That is why we need Thync now more than ever. It is a hardware startup that can manage and improve the mood. It consists of two wireless devices, one of them assisting in relieving the stress and the other helping a person to recharge. How does it do it? Via a non-invasive method of sending weak impulses to the brain.
Possible Challenges
Although IoT offers wonderful possibilities, there are also a number of limitations. Currently, the biggest obstacle is that the devices lack regulations, protocols, and standards. We have previously written about how technology is frequently a few steps ahead of the law in various fields. This is no different. Apart from protocols and standards, data ownership regulation poses another serious problem.
With the constantly improving technology, so are the threats to cybersecurity. In the case of health information, it is crucial to ensure that nobody will be able to hack into the systems and compromise the personal health information that can be misused for fraudulent actions.
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