How Internet Of Things Is Promising Better Healthcare facilities

Internet Of Things in Healthcare promises to manage the personalization of care services and can maintain a digital identity for every person in the domain of Healthcare. Internet Of Things has improved access to Healthcare, increased the quality of care, most importantly reduced the cost of care. The applications of Internet Of Things in Healthcare is increasing by the day. This empowers an individual to follow the basic healthcare principle of “the right care for the right person at the right time”. Finally a sustainable service in Healthcare focuses on the prevention, early pathology detection, home-care instead of the expensive clinical one,checks the overall well-being .

How IoT Is Beneficial For People In Healthcare Domain

IoT For Patients

Wearables like fitness bands and other wireless connected devices like blood pressure and heart rate monitoring cuffs, glucometer etc. These give patients access to personalized attention. These devices are tuned to remind calorie count, exercise check, appointments, blood pressure variations and much more.

IoT has changed people’s lives, especially elderly patients, by enabling constant tracking of health conditions. This has a major impact on people living alone and their families. On any disturbance, alert mechanism sends signals to family members and concerned health providers.

Iot For Physicians

By using wearables and other home monitoring equipment embedded with IoT, physicians can keep track of patients’ health more effectively. They can track patients’ adherence to treatment plans or any need for immediate medical attention. IoT enables healthcare professionals to be more watchful and connect with the patients proactively. Data collected from IoT devices can help physicians identify the best treatment process for patients and reach the expected outcomes.

IoT For Hospitals

Apart from monitoring patients’ health, there are many other areas where IoT devices are very useful in hospitals. IoT devices tagged with sensors are used for real time tracking locations of medical equipment like wheelchairs, defibrillators, nebulizers, oxygen pumps, and other monitoring equipment. Deployment of the medical staff at different locations can hence be analyzed in real-time.

The spread of infections is a major concern for patients in hospitals. IoT-enabled hygiene monitoring devices is used to prevent patients from getting infected. IoT devices also help in asset management like pharmacy inventory control, and environmental monitoring, for instance, checking refrigerator temperature, and humidity and temperature control.

IoT for Health Insurance Companies 

There are numerous opportunities for health insurers with IoT-connected intelligent devices. Insurance companies can leverage data captured through health monitoring devices for their underwriting and claims operations. This data will enable them to detect fraud claims and identify prospects for underwriting. IoT devices bring transparency between insurers and customers in the underwriting, pricing, claims handling, and risk assessment processes. The IoT-captured data-driven decisions in all operation processes, customers will have adequate visibility into underlying thought behind every decision made.

Insurers may offer incentives to their customers for using and sharing health data generated by IoT devices. They can reward customers for using IoT devices to keep track of their routine activities. Adherence to treatment plans and precautionary health measures. This will help insurers to reduce claims significantly. Therefore, IoT devices also enable insurance companies to validate claims through the data captured by these devices.

Reference : https://www.wipro.com/en-IN/business-process/what-can-iot-do-for-healthcare-/

ADVANTAGES OF IoT IN HEALTHCARE:

• Cost Reduction: IoT enables patient monitoring in real time, thus significantly cutting down unnecessary visits to doctors, hospital stays and re-admissions.
• Improved Treatment: It enables physicians to make evidence-based informed decisions and brings absolute transparency

• Faster Disease Diagnosis: Continuous patient monitoring and real time data helps in diagnosing diseases at an early stage or even before the disease develops based on symptoms.
• Proactive Treatment: Continuous health monitoring opens the doors for providing proactive medical treatment.
• Drugs and Equipment Management: Management of drugs and medical equipment is a major challenge in a healthcare industry. Through connected devices, they are managed and utilized efficiently with reduced costs.
• Error Reduction: Data generated through IoT devices not only help in effective decision making but also ensure smooth healthcare operations with reduced errors, waste and system costs.

The Potential of IoT in Corona-virus like Disease Control

Dilip Sarangan (GLOBAL RESEARCH DIRECTOR FOR INTERNET OF THINGS), in his blog, explains that Internet of Things (IoT), a network of interconnected systems and advances in data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and ubiquitous connectivity can help by providing an early warning system to curb the spread of infectious diseases. And the implementation of such a technology should not be problematic for a country especially like China as they lead the way in IoT adoption followed by Japan.

Recent Interview with Dilip Sarangan Reveals about how IoT is used to overcome global Pandemic Covid-19

 “The first step in infectious disease control is detection. While a global network of sensors is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future. China does have the ability to implement such a network in the country. China has a history of implementing wide-area IoT solutions (i.e. video surveillance) on a scale that has never been seen before. So why not a network of virus-detection sensors? Couple that with facial recognition and location, existing surveillance cameras to identify, trace, and monitor people that may have contracted the coronavirus.”

Dilip Sarangan

“An added layer would be to also track every individual that an infected patient contacted. While this may sound like a police state to many, ultimately, leveraging IoT and AI may be the most logical way to prevent highly infectious diseases from spreading rapidly in a world that is getting smaller every day with air travel.”

Dilip Sarangan

“In the short term, continued diligence in monitoring every ‘compromised’ individual as they go through customs at airports and/or border crossings and leveraging AI-sensors to help with targeted quarantines and quick treatment to mitigate the spread the corona-virus. Long term, the United Nations, WHO, as well as other global agencies can start the process of gaining buy-in from governments across the world to develop an early detection system to uncover these infectious diseases before they become global emergencies,” says Sarangan.

THE CURRENT APPLICATIONS OF IOT DURING OUTBREAK OF COVID-19

• Using IoT to dissect an outbreak

With the numerous and diverse datasets collected by mobile devices, IoT can have many more applications during an epidemic.
IoT is helpfull for tracing the origin of an outbreak. A recent study by researchers at MIT used aggregated mobile phone data to trace. In granular details of short distances and periods, the spread of dengue virus in Singapore during 2013 and 2014. Therefore, due to overlaying geographic information system (GIS) on IoT mobile data from infected patients can do two things. Upstream, it can assist epidemiologists in their search for patient zero; it can help identify all the persons who have come into contact with the infected patients.

• Using IoT to ensure compliance to quarantine

IoT consequently ensures patient compliance once the potentially infected persons enter into quarantine. Public health personnel can monitor which patients remain quarantined, and which patients have breached the quarantine. The IoT data will hence help track down others exposed due to the breach.

• Using IOT to manage patient care

IoT rather helps in monitoring all the patients who are high-risk enough to warrant quarantine but not serious enough to warrant in-hospital care. The daily check-up of the patients is done manually by healthcare workers who approach door-to-door. In one reported instance, a healthcare worker had patients standing in their apartment balconies. Hence one could fly a drone up to take their temperatures with an infrared thermometer. With IoT, the patients can have their temperatures taken and upload the data with their mobile devices to the cloud for analysis. Hence healthcare workers can not only collect more data using less time but also reduce the chance for cross-infection with the patients.