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Internet of Things (IoT)

Smart watches, smart cars, smart homes, smart cities and now smart health, IoT for personalized healthcare

Why IoT

Although the global market value of IoT is estimated to reach $7.1 trillion by the year 2020, the concept is still relatively new to a large part of the consumer segment. It is true even then that a convergence of multiple technologies, including but not limited to ubiquitous wireless communication, embedded systems, machine learning and real-time analytics has brought about a huge evolution in the vision of the IoT. Today we will talk about how this "smart" concept can contribute to the advancement of the healthcare industry.

What IoT can do for healthcare

Healthcare IoT is a connected infrastructure of software applications and medical devices that can communicate with various healthcare IT systems. With a foundational mission to optimize for better health in a faster and easier environment, IoT in healthcare connects patients and healthcare providers via software and technology. The Internet of Things is an example of technology that helps physicians build better relationships with patients and cultivate their engagement in the process.

The health-monitoring IoT devices range from heart rate monitors to electronic wrist bands and smart beds. The aim is to minimize manual interaction or human intervention, creating opportunities for improved accuracy and efficiency, not to speak of economic benefits. Not only does it lead to safer and healthier patients, it allows physicians to devote their time to specialized and personalized healthcare and paves way for innovation. Patients spend more time interacting with their doctors and general awareness increases manifold. We must keep in mind that healthcare being a vast ecosystem, the list is endless when it comes to IoT applications in the industry.

In a health data context quite some data from medical devices and monitoring systems ultimately end up  in Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) Systems or in specific applications which are connected with them and send the data to labs, doctors, nurses and other parties involved. As health-related data is collected and increasingly is available in real-time, it gets integrated with electronic healthcare records (EHR).

EHR systems are far from omnipresent and most have not been designed with the Internet of Things, RFID and real-time data in mind; they have been designed, if all is well, to make healthcare faster, more patient-centric, more affordable and better from the perspective of the patient’s health and the work of healthcare professionals, based on rather static data.

These outcomes are also essential in many IoT use cases in healthcare, yet they are not always achieved. Moreover, there are so many approaches to the digitization of healthcare records that in practice an Internet of Things deployment needs to take into account these differences if it is related with an individual patient.

What do we propose

Till now we do not have a single platform which maintains every type of healthcare record from our fitness devices data to our health records. Maintaining all data separately becomes a tedious task. Also, data sharing to the medical practitioner becomes limited. We propose to offer a single platform to store all you health records from various fitness devices to collaborate into a single report which would give a better picture of your health status to the medical practitioner who can then provide with a personalized healthcare. We are in the development phase for integrating IoT into our platform which will soon be available to our users.

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