The Applications of IoT in the Healthcare Industry
By Adam Lacombe
Connected devices are garnering a lot of media attention for their application in creating a smart, connected home. With the growing popularity of the Amazon Echo, it has become simpler than ever to create a connected home experience, with Alexa as the central controller. Within retail, connected experiences offer obvious solutions, such as tracking shopper habits, integrating payment, mapping, and push notifications based on geolocation. While these solutions offer sexy applications for connected devices and IoT, the healthcare industry is paving the way in actual utility and functionality of connected ecosystems.
Connected devices are meant to belong as part of an ecosystem. When many connected devices work in unison to gather data, analyze in real time, and react based on those analytics, a connected experience is created, offering the full benefits of IoT. In the healthcare industry, the potential for full-continuum integration is so obvious, and even already being implemented. Within a hospital setting, a patient is given a bracelet, which contains an RFID tag. When that patient attempts to exit the room, or use the washroom, a beacon can easily alert a healthcare provider. Take that one step further. If that same bracelet has the means to gather bio-feedback, it could monitor blood pressure, heart-rate, body temperature, movement, and gather many other measurements. That data is analyzed in real-time and anything out of the ordinary flagged to a healthcare provider. That nurse or doctor would receive a notification on their mobile device, or even potentially a smartwatch(for hands-free notifications), alerting them of any incidents. This is all documented in the patient’s digital file in real-time.
On the healthcare provider’s side, an RFID tag is placed in their ID badge. This tag monitors the movements of the hospital staff over the course of their shift. This data can be analyzed for a multitude of different reasons. From a level-of-care point of view, the badge registers every time the nurse enters any patient’s room based on beacon-based geo-location within the hospital. From a staffing point of view, the data can be compiled and analyzed to identify inefficiencies in the work patterns of staff. This is a relatively superficial solution when you consider the realm of possibilities related to analyzing this volume of data in real-time.
Connected healthcare solutions can play an even more important role outside of the hospital setting. For at-home care, we can see smart-home solutions integrating with the connected healthcare experience. Wearables that monitor patient vital signs can alert health providers if necessary, call emergency services in the case of a fall or emergency, or make a note on the patient’s digital file for non-emergencies situations. In-home technologies can also alert family members when care providers arrive and leave, or offer updated notes on the patient’s health. These technologies can then integrate with a billing/payment system based on the amount of time the care provider spent at the patient’s residence.
These are only a few examples of how IoT applications are relevant in healthcare. For the sake of this article, I’ve focused on a very narrow set of solutions. Connected experiences facilitate the healthcare process for patients, relieving much of the stress and anxiety related to hospitalization and illness. Further, IoT applications in healthcare greatly increase the long-term efficiency of the system and greatly reduce human error.
