In this technically advanced era, people expect everything to be fast forward, be it any sector, entertainment, sports, education, or healthcare. In the healthcare industry, there are multiple things to handle such as patient data, strict regulations, and operations, complexities, social responsibilities, etc. Therefore, adopting advanced technological solutions and innovation has become a necessity to acquire more adaptability among the users and investors.
However, the healthcare industry is having consistent growth in the last couple of decades. But current pandemic has revealed a lot of susceptibilities and inadequacies in this sector. To alleviate these inefficiencies in the system, the industry is integrating IoT into the healthcare system. This technology is helping to improve the services with several efficient healthcare IT solutions. IoT can provide an interconnected network of smart & intelligent devices that will store the patient’s data to examine the situation and making decisions accordingly. In this, multiple devices will work in a cycle and then, send the data to the cloud.
If you are interested to know more about the role of IoT, its benefits, required features, applications, and the future in the healthcare industry, dive into this below guide.
Table of Contents
Introduction to IoT Technology
IoT in the healthcare industry represents the connected devices that are helpful to manage clinics, hospitals, or other medical settings. These IoT devices comprise automated lighting, smart thermostats, digital signage, security systems, and different types of sensors. All these devices play an important role in providing patients comfort, care, and safety.
Integration of IoT has made it possible for the healthcare industry to observe the patients and their health remotely, providing them needed medication & care and overcoming the losses industry had due to the pandemic. IoT is a key component for the digital transformation of the healthcare industry. These healthcare IoT integrated solutions provide remote health monitoring of patients, medication intake tracking, drug tracking, medical inventory & equipment tracking, and smart hospital space. These are some of the advantages to get from IoT integration in the healthcare sector.
How IoT Works in Healthcare?
IoT devices are comprised of radio or sensors that can communicate with the physical world and convey information using the internet. It collects varied kinds of information and gets the data from healthcare professionals. These IoT devices form an ecosystem to communicate with each other and guide the healthcare providers to initiate critical actions in favor of patients.
IoT devices gather the data consistently and then, transmit it to the cloud to help the medical system making decisions. Check out these following steps to know about the workflow of IoT-
- IoT device comprises a sensor that gathers patient’s data or gets it from the doctor/nurses.
- IoT device works upon AI-driven algorithms such as machine learning to examine the gathered data.
- After that IoT device determine if it requires to perform the collected information or convey it to the cloud.
- These IoT devices deliver beneficial information to healthcare professionals, doctors, and robots for making actionable choices.
Market Stats & Size of IoT in Healthcare Worldwide
It is noticed that the emergence of the internet of things in Health & Fitness app solutions has completely modernized the healthcare industry. This thing doesn’t only change the way of monitoring or treating the patients but also changes the healthcare resource’s productivity and enhances the healthcare process’s effectiveness.
According to Statista research, the market size of the internet of things in the healthcare sector is having a rapid growth continuously. The below graph represents the growth of this industry based on the passing years worldwide from 2016 to 2025. The healthcare-relevant IoT revenue was recorded around $24 billion in 2016 that is predicted to reach over $135 billion by 2025.
By seeing these statistics, we can say that IoT in healthcare has the potential to provide benefits and profit to the industry. For businesses that are based upon the healthcare industry, it is high time for them to implement the Internet of things-based apps to gain more advantages.
Well-known IoT Uses in Different Healthcare Divisions
We know about a lot of sectors that got affected during the pandemic, but the healthcare industry is one of the sectors that has never experienced ups and downs. After the integration with the IoT technology, it has lifted swiftly. Not only one, every person and business related to healthcare have benefitted from the IoT integrated healthcare solutions. Which are these segments? Have a look at below-
IoT For Patients Health Mobility Solutions
In healthcare, the domain is mostly used for monitoring and examining the patients. There are some wearables such as wireless connected devices and fitness bands that are used to track the patient’s activities and behavior 24*7 to identify the improvement in them.
Apart from it, these IoT-integrated solutions are also used for counting calories, tracking blood pressure and heart rate, glucose monitoring, and many more. This tracking and observing alleviate the chances of hearts failure, diabetes, cardiac arrest, etc., and inform the healthcare professionals before such a situation occurs.
IoT for Doctors & Hospitals
Despite monitoring of patients, healthcare software solutions have been advantageous even for hospitals and doctors to manage medical operations and processes. The arrival of IoT in healthcare has relieved a lot of people who had concerned about their increased disease and health issues. These advanced healthcare solutions have performed much better in comparison to traditional methods to meet the requirements.
Data collected in real-time through IoT applications helps a lot and sensor-equipped IoT devices are beneficial for analyzing and tracking all the medical equipment. These devices are also utilized for environmental tracking, hospital inventory control, device temperature check often, and controlling the humidity. Through the IoT devices, healthcare professionals can check the real-time situations of patients easily who are enduring harmful diseases.
IoT for Enterprises
Businesses always want to invest in a lucrative sector and the healthcare sector is one of the profitable markets. Some of the enterprises prefer to take the help of a mobile app development agency so that they can enter the domain with a boom. As of now, when IoT is playing a significant role in healthcare, it becomes a necessity for businesses to alter their process accordingly.
IoT contains various business apps beneficial to the existing stakeholder linking them to patients & their families, hospitals, healthcare staff, pharmacies, clinics, and insurance service providers.
IoT for Medical Insurance Agencies
The collected data from health tracking devices are used by the insurance firms for their claim procedures. This data helps them to see if anyone has done a false claim. IoT devices work as a medium between insurance firms and their customers that provides complete transparency in the claim management procedures. It puts data security on the top and prefers data-driven decisions in all the operations related to insurance.
IoT for Physicians
A lot of physicians are using health monitoring apps and medical devices enabled with IoT to provide their patients home-based care and treatment efficiently. This way, they can easily know about the medication and treatment plans of their patients. To make this happen, wearable app development services have been preferred by various businesses, even now, most of the hospitals, doctors, and physicians are also having them.
The reason behind such a change is the flexibility provided by the wearable apps. These applications perform better, and physicians use them to know the response of patients to medical treatment plans or given medication or to deal instantly in an emergency.
Benefits Offered by Internet of Things
Integration of the internet of things or IoT in the healthcare domain provides countless benefits and it is why it is in high demand by organizations. Following are some of the benefits of IoT offered to the healthcare industry.
1. The Use of Preventive Medicines
Through the real-time patient data provided by IoT devices, healthcare professionals understand the present condition of the patient and recommend them the required medicines and treatment to prevent any unwanted situation. IoT-provided data is helpful to doctors to observe the changes and find out the possible issue before it occurs into an uncontrollable disease.
Blend of IoT technology with Artificial Intelligence would be more effective in this case as doctors can avail the advantages of data analytics to determine the medicine for patients.
2. Quickly Processed Patient’s Data
IoT devices are helpful to healthcare professionals and doctors to process the lengthy data of patients in less time and with ease, otherwise, this process takes a lot of effort and hours to complete. The addition of IoT in the medical process along with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can help doctors very much by providing all the potential treatments quickly after analyzing related data and past trends about the patient’s health.
3. Better Mobility of Medical Resources
Businesses are taking up the IoT app development services to facilitate the medical sector with a tracking system based on IoT to get viral alerts. This tracking system is helpful to locate the patient immediately and provide them with the necessary medication after seeing any sudden change in their parameters.
In the situation of coronavirus pandemic, patients needed a lot of care than before from medical professionals who were already over-burdened with the work, hence it defines the need to have the latest equipment and resources by healthcare staff to track all the patients simultaneously in real-time.
4. Improved Medicine Management & Observance
Medical applications comprised with IoT can help healthcare professionals and doctors to check if the patient has taken the prescribed medicines or not? If there has been any kind of non-observance, the staff can remind patients about the medicines by calling them. This entire process can be automated as well and eliminate the need for human involvement in this.
5. Enhanced Connectivity and In-Expensive
Enterprises must hire expert app developers to develop IoT-aided healthcare applications using modern communication technology to have better data connectivity & sharing. There can be used technologies such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to follow the track of possible illness that makes the process fast and easy, less time consuming, and in-expensive as well. Therefore, it makes the treatment reasonable for the patients.
6. Monitoring & Reporting Simultaneously
The rise in healthcare app development services has already given the medical sector a big helping hand but now, with the IoT integration, there can be noticed drastic changes in the industry. Doctors can observe the crucial parameters of a patient in real-time to help them with the preventive treatment for the emergencies like Blood pressure, diabetes, cardiac arrest, heart failure, and asthma attack. Medical reports such as blood sugar level reports, ECG, X-rays, etc. all are saved in the cloud and can be accessed by the user remotely via a mobile device.
7. Better Cyber Security
Hospitals, clinics, and others store massive data records and large files about the patient’s health information. This patients’ data is confidential and needs to provide proper security. Thus, the healthcare sector uses IoT-based cloud servers to prevent any kind of attacks and security breaches. These servers are integrated with the next-generation systems that make it impossible for anyone to break the security firewalls.
Exciting Features of IoT Provided for Healthcare Domain
IoT-enabled devices used in the healthcare sector unlock several new opportunities for medical professionals and makes their work faster and easier. That is why businesses prefer to choose a healthcare app development company to get efficient and feature-rich IoT-integrated healthcare solutions. Keep scrolling to know what are these features?
Health Monitoring
With this feature, a strong network can be established between doctors & patients by taking the help of IoT. It is easy to track the movements of patients and their health conditions in real-time. In an emergency, medical workers can also provide immediate assistance and set reminders according to the need. It provides patients the flexibility to not travel hospital again and again as they keep getting medical attention and treatment continuously.
Handling Emergencies
After serving patients in a stable environment, hospitals and medical professionals are taking their services to next level by handling emergencies quickly. It has been possible by integrating real-time health tracking with location sharing to enable any help that is required to the patient. It is beneficial to accelerate the customer experience in the healthcare domain.
Better Medicine Delivery
IoT implementation has changed the way of delivering medicines creatively. Now, it is very easy to deliver medicines at the location preferred by users. With the required modifications in the system, there will be no delay and no health issues while delivering the drugs. With the combination of IoT and smart devices using a wireless network and the use of nanobots, it is now possible to reach medicines to the remote parts of the human body to diagnose and cure the diseased tissue.
Track Medication’s Impact
While having healthcare IoT integrated solutions, businesses focus on having each feature including tracking of medication intake, that’s why they prefer to hire IoT developers. The medication tracking based on IoT permits doctors to observe the effect of their recommended medicine’s dosage on the condition of the patient. These apps work in the favor of patients as well, patients can analyze their medication intake such as using in-app reminders or noticing the symptoms that occurred after the medication. This app can relate to smart devices to manage the different medications easily.
Smart Hospital Space
It is one of the most useful features in which cloud-connected ward sensors such as window and door contacts, a light switch, and ambient sensors such as noise detectors, and hydrometers enable patients to make their surrounding comfortable hospital stay as per their choice.
IoT Applications in Healthcare Sector
The advent of IoT has made everyone excited including businesses and users for having a bright future in the field of technology due to the different sight and scope of use in different sectors. In the healthcare industry, various remarkable IoT applications are having a good impact on the users. Check out below-
Wearables
Comprising IoT in wearables and devices has made the lives of patients convenient and smooth. That’s why to make things easier, wearable app development services are preferred by enterprises as it is also a lucrative way to gain profit.
Blood Coagulation Testing
As we know that IoT healthcare apps provide real-time tracking of patients’ health. It also provides a blood coagulation test that also helps in maintaining the activities of patients.
Moodables
These are known as head-fitted wearables unified with IoT used to transfer low-level current to the human brain. It is a way to refresh the patient’s mood.
Hearables
These latest hearing aids have made drastic changes to hearing techniques. These have modified the way to heal people with hearing issues.
Smart Glucose Monitoring & Insulin Pens
These devices are much useful for patients with diabetes as their glucose level can be monitored with this. They can also repost the status frequently to their doctors.
Ingestible Sensors
These are very tiny sensors to track the patient’s medical treatment in their body. These alert the doctors immediately if there is any issue or loophole that occurs. In this, sensors send a small signal to the wearable of the patient that transmits the data to the standalone mobile app.
Robotic Surgery
Surgery assisted by robots helps healthcare professionals to operate multifaceted surgeries with better control, accuracy, mobility compared to standard approaches.
IoT In Healthcare Sector- A Promising Future Ahead!
Right from Artificial Intelligence to futuristic robots, from sensor-integrated wearables devices to machine learning-based data analytics, the healthcare industry has come through radical changes. Healthcare IoT integrated solutions are also offering plenty of services and opportunities to the medical sector. Based on all the positive results, we can assume that the use of these technologies will benefit both patients and healthcare professionals in the near future. Let’s have a look below-
1. Cognitive Computation
The machine can’t think of itself, but three important aspects are attached to it. They are understanding, reasoning, and learning. Understanding refers to that a machine can form a model of concepts and relationships between information. Reasoning refers to the result from the model without different programming for every issue. Learning refers to the collective knowledge from the gathered data. Based on this, it is pretty much predictive that IoT has great potential and scope in the healthcare system.
2. IoT Execution in Smart Devices
According to the conducted surveys, IoT will be implemented to around 200 billion devices as this connectivity is providing unexpected outcomes to the industry. The reason behind this is the increasing use of smart devices such as mobile phones, smartwatches, wrist bands, laptops, and others by people and integrating IoT in such wearable devices is much more convenient to them as well.
3. Telemedicine
As we have mentioned that the healthcare IoT devices can be executed with mobile apps to unlock the pioneer model of interaction and connectivity between patients and doctors. It also permits the remote patient to get the clinical services along with other ones like remote consultation, primary care, monitoring, reminders, intervention, etc.
Takeaways
To conclude, there is no doubt that IoT technology is unrelenting and evolving in leaps and bounds while expanding the healthcare industry. IoT has bolstered its position and has made an effective impact on the people related to the medical sector by assisting healthcare service providers to get connected with each possible patient worldwide. It will be easier to gain more useful insights about patient care and their treatment, medical environment, and treatment options with the integration of more technologies and devices along with the existing ones.
By seeing the immense popularity of IoT integrated healthcare solutions, businesses are also approaching leading companies to have healthcare app development services. In this order, no other company would be better than SemiDot Infotech as we are a mobile app development agency with experienced and skilled designers and developers who leave no stone unturned to meet your requirements. If you want in-expensive app development services with premium quality, you can join hands with us. Go ahead and get your solution developed.
