Healthcare remains one of the four prominent industries to adopt IoT, accounting for almost 20% of the global IoT market. But despite such impressive numbers, IoT healthcare solutions were anything but an overnight revolution. They’ve come a long way since the early days of telemedicine in the 2000’s up to the modern day’s proliferation of smart medical devices and full-scale smart hospital solutions. These smart devices have helped us achieve much more personalized, patient-centric healthcare services that are not limited to the hospital settings. They did it in a number of ways.
Remote patient monitoring
Healthcare service providers can use IoT to connect different types of sensors and patient monitoring devices to the cloud to keep track of patient’s data in real time 24/7. Specialized treatment, e.g. dialysis, can be thus performed from anywhere by using portable next-gen medical devices that allow for remote supervision by a doctor.
Smart medical devices
Remote data collection and device management popularized by IoT enables medical device manufacturers to create better, smarter healthcare solutions. They offer greater flexibility to be used alongside specific medical applications and configured according to the patient’s needs. They are much more reliable and in many cases successfully eliminate excessive human supervision and check-ups.
Wellness applications
IoT healthcare solutions have become an effective accelerator for wellness applications and preventive care programs. People are encouraged by their employers and insurance companies to lead healthy lifestyles by using wellness applications and obtaining high scores on their collected health metrics.
Smart hospital solutions
The advancement in smart medical devices and applications has led to more complex initiatives to digitize in-hospital operations and services. The smart hospital concept is used to describe an integrated multi-technology facility that uses modern IoT, analytics, and AI tools to improve the quality of healthcare services.
Big Data analytics and AI
Analytics and artificial intelligence tools greatly complement IoT healthcare solutions in different types of medical institutions, from hospital to research labs. Connected IoT devices unlocked vast amounts of patient data that can be collected and processed at large scale. This treasure trove of data is fundamental for training medical AI applications, which can then scan real-life patients for all kinds of conditions. As of now, in many cases they do it more effectively than humans.
