See what the latest research says about how IoT is impacting the healthcare industry. Check out the many use cases to consider as well as a sample IoT architecture.
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CES 2018 bore witness to several companies with their breakthrough innovations in the realm of diagnosing, monitoring, and treating illnesses and jaw-breaking advancements in global disease cases, health care delivery, etc. AI assistants and chatbots are talking to patients regarding their symptoms and providing helpful insights to determine their health conditions. These incredible little helpers are freeing up doctors’ time and helping more people get timely care. The most interesting fact is that these helpers don’t grow old, nor do they get tired and errors are very, very minimal.
Let’s get into this in greater detail. After all, it is really an incomparable innovation. The primary purpose of AI or other technology in healthcare is to connect doctors with patients through a smart device, without restrictions. In fact, the patients might open up more, helping the doctors reach a better diagnosis faster. This leads to an empowerment of the consumer, with practically no inefficiencies, and the doctor invariably makes informed decisions through better connectivity, precision-centered monitoring, and information gathering.
IoHT has two very crucial purposes:
Improved disease management that provides better patient experience
Reduced healthcare costs so it’s affordable for a wider demographic
For example, it is possible to record the movements of patients when they press the call button, go to the bathroom, hit the bed alarm, etc. The information pertaining to each activity is recorded by a device that evaluates the number of instances in which the patient needs assistance.
The machine learning data will be processed automatically and intelligently to know whether the patient is progressing towards wellness or deteriorating. This streamlined communication process ensures that the patient can avoid risks (or at least benefit from timely detection) and can go home sooner. IBM’s Jeopardy-winning system, Watson, was a huge hit a few years back when it helped oncologists determine the best mode of treatment for cancer patients.
Data retrieval in such an intelligent manner has helped patients diagnose rare diseases in patients, and has even helped doctors detect secondary illnesses apart from those which the patient had been admitted with.
Crunch the figures and you will come up with interesting data on how IoHT is becoming a major and trustworthy ally in the field of medicine. According to recent studies, global Internet of Things in the healthcare market is slated to grow from $41.22 billion in 2017 to $158.07 billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 30.8 percent. This is a perfect example depicting how pharmaceutical products are being planned, manufactured, used, stored and consumed by the population.
Some areas where IoT can make a significant difference to the healthcare business are:
Data insights have been of crucial importance in the field of medicine production. Production managers go through over 200 variables to make sure a product is safe and effective, ensuring homogeneity in medicine and drug manufacturing. Data is very important, as it helps in figuring out problems sooner and saves time and effort.
There’s been an increased use of sensors in the production area, which enables the aggregation of data from different departments and manufacturing plants. This means the manufacturing activities can be supervised at any time from any location. This kind of real-time monitoring ensures that wastage is minimized, equipment is properly utilized, and production costs are lowered.
Companies are developing innovative practices to ensure the quality of drugs without any human intervention. Integrating the manufacturing equipment with sensors enables continuous quality checks that saves considerable time and manpower. IoT helps companies exercise stringent quality control methods in the production of medicines and medical devices, and it’s already been put into practice in India and abroad.
Sensitive medicines and medicines with a very short shelf-life can be protected through real-time monitoring of containers, and alerts are issued in case of unfavorable conditions.
The entire process of medicine manufacturing has been entrenched in accuracy, while relevant technologies are used to keep it under budget. This entire process can be optimized through IoT-enabled systems, including clinical trials where data devices are captured to report positive effects and highlight side effects. These insights aid in better patient monitoring.
Researchers, stakeholders, and regulators all have access to the data made available through IoT. This aids in better collaboration among all of them, and they no longer have to painstakingly go through multiple logs offline.
Patients and pharma companies can enjoy a number of short-term and long-term benefits. Medicines are brought to patients at reduced prices, making them affordable to a larger segment of the population. Better transit management of drugs, patient monitoring, excellent supply-demand balance and quality monitoring are all examples of this.
There are four layers of the architecture of IoT healthcare. Here they are:
1. Medical devices to connect and monitor: An integral layer in IoT is to introduce intelligent connected devices that would monitor the health of the patients, take readings, observe patterns, and alert when there are imperfections in the patterns (the indication of an impending disease or worsening of condition). The patient can wear the device; he/she will be connected to the device through which it can monitor the status and patient vitals. It can remotely monitor at-risk patients, and even make informed decisions and prevent trips to the emergency room.
2. Multi-service gateway for IoT applications with remote management and wireless connectivity: This aids in onboard processing, data aggregation, and data transfer — perfect for M2M solutions. Both web and mobile applications are developed to meet the needs of the hospital including doctors, laboratories and other services, and patients. The existing network technology will probably have to be perfected and upgraded to accommodate secure payment solutions. And this is a major help in monitoring patient data as well, where routers collect the data, and then upload it to a central repository dedicated to data collection.
3. M2M integration platform: Forbes believes that M2M is one among the fastest growing types of connected device technologies presently in the market. Presumably, because it can use any sensor to communicate, which means systems can monitor themselves while automatically responding to changes in the environment. Human involvement is much lower. And this would be of perfect help when patient communication is needed.
Through an M2M integration platform, companies can unleash a new generation of consumer-facing services in wearables and patient monitoring. It can collect patient-specific data, transport and analyze it right there in the field, and can react faster than even a medical professional. For example, if a patient’s vital signs drop, a device that’s connected to the cloud (private or public) can administer oxygen and provide additional care until healthcare professionals arrive on the scene. Through M2M technology, the patient doesn’t even have to be in the hospital to receive this kind of care. It can be done when the patient is at home.
4. Reminders/alerts, generating reports: Through the M2M integration platform, the data that’s collected and stored in the cloud would be analyzed and checked for patterns. If a patient has a doctor’s appointment on a particular day, the wearable device (worn by the patient) would remind him/her. The same goes for medicine as well. Patients don’t have to remember to take their medicine anymore. Leave it all to the wearable — it will remind the patient to take his/her medication through reminders and alerts. Fitness tracking, social network connectivity, and health and wellness monitoring are just a few of the benefits enjoyed through M2M integration platforms.
Healthcare providers can take full advantage of IoHT to make transcendental changes in the lives of patients. The level of healthcare provided to patients has improved considerably. With more connectivity, intelligent information gathering and remote monitoring made possible through judicious and studied use of healthcare resources, milestones are being covered. It shapes the field of healthcare in such a manner that there is a reduction in waste, with very few inefficiencies, while empowering the health of consumers.
Here are some key areas in which healthcare is being shaped by IoHT.
The pharmaceutical and medical device industries are evolving at a fast rate, but there is something they have to cater to as well — government regulations. While complying with the speed, safety, and flexibility of devices, they also have to comply with new class-based regulations that should be followed in the medical devices.
While conforming to the changing regulations, pharmaceutical companies have to cater to an ever-growing consumer requirement as well. There is a growing number of aging patients, followed by increased insurance coverage rates and improved healthcare availability.
