Smart Devices for Connected Health
Is that the Future?
As a society, we need to reimagine our health and social care models if we want to meet the challenge of a growing elderly population with greater levels of chronic disease. The digital revolution offers us the opportunity to leverage technological innovations to develop proactive Connected Health and social care models that are patient-centered and facilitate efficient management of health and wellness.
The idea of connected health is a dynamic and fluid area of digital health that integrates wireless technologies with human and biological interfaces to improve health outcomes. Connected health can improve healthcare delivery by aggregating health data from multiple sources outside of the traditional healthcare setting, leveraging AI and machine learning to decipher health patterns from the data when analyzed together, and accurately sharing pertinent patient health status information to caretakers and providers in a timely manner.
As we look forward, this shift from reactive to proactive to predictive is going to be made possible with the rapid uptick in smart home technology. According to one analysis, the global smart home market is projected to grow from $84.5 billion in 2021 to $138.9 billion by 2026, with a CAGR of 10.4% from 2021 to 2026.
As smart home devices like the Amazon Echo and Samsung Smart TV become increasingly popular, Connected Health comes closer into focus as a viable solution for today’s healthcare challenges.
Imagine a world where people’s smartbands and smart home devices are connected. These technologies would passively collect data and send it to the Connected Hub, which would run algorithms to discover harmful behaviors, habits, and/or illnesses that a person was previously unaware of. Together, these devices would also provide health information that doctors need but often do not have in order to understand the full picture. By building an app that Smart TVs could download to make any Smart TV into a Connected Hub, users would be able to access their analyzed, comprehensive health info at the press of a button; and if something felt really wrong, you have the option to press “HELP” and alert your doctor.
How would this work in action? Let me give you an example. Let’s say you are an older adult who lives alone. You’ve been having a normal week for the most part and haven’t done anything out of your ordinary, but for the past two days, you have been feeling dizzy and nauseous. You think it might be the new meds you’re on, but just to be safe you check your Connected Hub. Your smartband — especially Somatix’s smartband that not only detects drinking using its patented gesture-based detection technology but also quantifies it by converting sips to milliliters — and smart faucet data have cross-checked your hydration levels to find out that you have not been drinking enough water during the day and are consequently under-hydrated.
However, the data from your Smart Toilet shows you are using the bathroom more often; the Connected Hub cross-checks this data with your smartband, smart lights, and smart switch to discover you have been waking up more often in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. By analyzing all this data together, your Connected Hub alerts you that you are at increased UTI risk and then asks if you want to alert your physician. As a result of this seamless synthesis of data, Connected Hubs make doctors’ lives easier by providing helpful context on things that impact human health (e.g. under-hydration) or indicate something is wrong (e.g. fall prediction).
This example shows how Smart Devices and Connected Hub can be valuable tools for those living alone, but in reality, they can be helpful in many different settings. From users who are healthy to those living in assisted living or nursing facilities to patients returning home from the hospital, Connected Hub can help make life easier.
When your smartband detects you have woken up in the morning, it would send this to your Connected Hub. If you drink coffee in the mornings, the Connected Hub would signal to your smart coffee maker to turn ON and make your morning brew. When your smart lock detects you have left the house, it sends this info to the Connected Hub to signal your robotic smart vacuum to clean the house when you aren’t there.
During a particularly warm evening, your Smartband’s sensors would detect you are overheating and send this info to your Connected Hub. In turn, your Connected Hub signals your voice assistant to tell you that you’re overheating and ask if you would like to increase your AC. When you say “yes”, the voice assistant signals the Smart Thermostat to increase the AC.
To avoid keeping you awake or waking you up at night, your smart dishwasher and smart dryer would wait until your smartband detects you’re deep in sleep to run overnight. While you’re asleep, your smartband would also be able to determine your perfect sleep temperature for improved sleep duration and quality. If you wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, the smart lighting system would switch on the correct (night) lights to minimize your risk of tripping and falling. This would be valuable in preventing falls, which lead to 800,000 hospitalizations a year in the U.S. Moreover, if the Connected Hub detects a pattern that you are waking up frequently at night, the smart speaker would play soothing music to put you to sleep.
Thus, not only can Connected Health leverage AI and machine learning to improve someone’s quality of life, but it can bring together all the context that contributes to health to better understand how well healthcare therapies and interventions are working in real-time. Is someone’s blood pressure too high because they aren’t taking their pills? Is someone at risk of a UTI?
In the hustle and bustle of daily life, focusing on the minutia of health may not be feasible for everyone. Connected Health has a lot to offer in this context, assisting health professionals in improving healthcare quality and outcomes by putting Big Data analytics at their disposal.
It is expected that the massive deployment of personalized Connected Health systems and services will have a significant impact on our lives as citizens, patients, and consumers. Looking forward, hopefully, it will help governments reduce health care costs, improve quality of life, and increase the convenience of accessing healthcare. The Connected Health paradigm has the potential to shift our current system from disease care to health care, and it is time we utilize it.
