• IoT technology has potential within healthcare applications through the provision of context-specific analytics and insight. 
• Through mapping the data from wearables to particular limits, medical professionals can prescribe dosing regimens of medication more precisely. 
• In clinical trials, wearable and embedded healthcare technology can assist in comprehension of the efficiency and pitfalls of particular medications well. 

With IoT, medical professionals now have the privilege of information from brand new, never before seen perspectives. Leveraging its utility enables more intelligent decision models/making that supersede conventional reporting and analytics. Improved supply chain efficiency is another added advantage. But what’s most relevant to medical professionals – a ground breaking revelation, is the depth of understanding it provides on patients, their states over the course of time. It allows for a supervision level that has a degree of accuracy that was unfathomable in history, and helps practitioners to diagnose more proactively, develop interventions, and prescribe medication with a startling degree of relevance. 

This blog by AICoreSpot explores some of the factors where IoT is serving as a revelation within the domain of healthcare. 

• We evaluate the gadgets that furnish patient data 
• Internally embedded medical tech that leverage proprietary transmission protocols to enable deeper, more specific health data 
• External medical tech, which enable transmission, monitoring, and regulation of patient health data 

IoT holds possibilities previously unfathomable in healthcare, through the provision of robust context-specific analysis and insights, crucial to the healthcare industry, in terms of patient management. For example, practitioners can detect a heart-attack or stroke through wearable tech and proactively instate measures to minimize negative consequences for the patient. The patient-practitioner relationship is experiencing a gradual paradigm shift through the deployment of IoT, and this degree of intricacy in the relationship has been a long time coming. Medical technology is advancing at such a quick pace that certain analysts have boldly predicted that human lifespan will increase by a jaw dropping margin within the next 80-years. The predicted lifespan of a baby born in 2100? Take a wild guess. Add one zero to 500 and you’d get there. That’s right, 5000 years. 

Data is not ‘post-facto’ restricted to the treating of a particular individual who is being monitored. Its usage is not limited to ongoing monitoring and supplemental diagnosis. We have IoT to thank, with its provision of enormous volumes of real-time patient information, and of healthy patients spread out all over the world. This provides a degree of monitoring and evaluation never before seen in medicine, and proactive intervention is just the icing on the cake. 

When leveraged in conjunction with conventional medical information, it provides a comprehensive bird’s eye view that medical professionals can use covertly and with negligible disruption to take decisions that have an impact on patient care. 

Predictive alerts for prevention 

Physical vitals documented by wearables can be utilized with local and external parameters such as time and weather to develop progressive analytical frameworks. These can foretell and avert events like strokes and heart attacks with authority and preciseness. 

Notifications 

By connecting the wearable’s real-time data to pre-defined thresholds, systems that monitor patients can put out notifications with regards to the dosing of medicine to patients or medical practitioners. This can enable practitioners and BigPharma to improve their decision-making capacities on modifying dosages or swapping the medicine itself. 

Evaluating the efficiency and pitfalls of drugs 

In clinical trials, wearables and embedded medical tech can enable supervisors to get a comprehensive view of the efficiency and pitfalls of particular drugs. They can also have more quality data with regards to a patient’s immediate physiological reactions to drugs, and ascertain what works and what doesn’t. It assists in proactive intervention when an undesirable result is expected or projected. 

The Bird’s Eye View 

Information from subjects that are alike to one another can be put into context with demographic considerations to foretell how contagious an illness could be, evaluate the market scope for a therapy area, trace patient journeys and results to facilitate research. Research has considerable impact on several commercial calls taken by organizations, and also by State-owned medical departments for resource allotments, etc. 

IoT has its limitations as well 

Like all technology, IoT isn’t bulletproof. By its very nature, IoT tech gets a hold of data and engages in real-time transmission to practitioners. The infrastructure to obtain and make sense of this information should hence be developed and built for scale – to obtain, process, and document real-time information from the humongous number of devices, and leverage analytical models to obtain swift insights. 

A vast majority of IoT devices, however, particularly ones that report healthcare information have the drawback of lacking information standards and protocols. Organization is lacking, and it is critical. This is understandable as IoT in healthcare is at the end, a relatively nascent development. Also, considerable vagueness encircles concerns of privacy and data ownership regulation. Provided that these limitations exist, do companies wish to host this large infrastructure on their facilities? Or would it help them better to concentrate on other avenues and engage data partners to host and administer their platforms? 

This is a key question facing healthcare providers with regards to IoT deployments. Time will tell how the industry will progress. The fact remains that IoT is set to be a fixture in the future of medicine, and its undeniable value will undoubtedly enhance the quality of life of patients, and the work life of practitioners and healthcare organizations the world over.