IOT IN HEALTHCARE

9 min readMay 15, 2021

IoT refers to the ever-growing network of physical objects that feature an IP address for net connectivity, and also the communication that happens between these objects and different internet-enabled devices and systems.In straightforward words, IoT is a system of connected physical objects that are accessible through the internet.E.g., a car automatically wears and tear and schedules a maintenance session or a train that dynamically calculates arrival times.

IoT in healthcare can enhance the quality of service and dramatically lessen healthcare costs. IoT is already in a few elements of healthcare, however, it has a greater capacity to consider alternate hospitals and medicine. St. John Sepsis Agent, DocBox, and identification of environmental factors affecting babies withinside the hospitals are three current and conventional illustrations demonstrating the plain impact of IoT in healthcare on the health of patients well-being. While St. John Sepsis Agent, advanced through the Cerner Corporation, facilitates to lessen the deadliest consequences of sepsis ensuing in 20–30 percentage probabilities of survival, the DocBox has solved the integration of IoT with medical gadgets through developing a successful interface that facilitates healthcare executives get data insights from complicated medical gadgets and enhance patient outcomes. Additionally, closed-loop insulin shipping gadgets, continuous glucose monitoring gadgets, linked inhalers, and ingestible sensors are simply many of the few path-breaking technologies which have been commercialized and changing the perceptions of essential healthcare techniques with the implementation of IoT.

The growing adoption of the Internet of Things has life-saving applications in the healthcare industry. By collecting data from viewing patient information, and diagnosing in real-time, IoT could improve the entire patient care system. in healthcare, including patient experience. By 2019, 87 percent of all health organizations are expected to have implemented IoT technology.

Use of IoT in Healthcare — USE OF IoT IN HEALTHCARE-Google image

IoT healthcare in India

Spectral InsightsSpectral Insights is a technology company providing solutions and systems to unravel the challenges within the healthcare industry. the corporate company was co-founded by Prasanth, Dipankar Das, Sumit Nath, Raghubansh Gupta, and Suhash Gerald in 2016. they have created a platform that gives innovative imaging, advanced analytics (AI/ML), and digital microscopy for hospitals, pharmaceutical company R&D, and clinical laboratories. The headquarters of the company is placed in Bengaluru, Karnataka.

The company operates with the pathology department to provide any time access to high-quality digital slide pictures (blood smear, biopsies, TB, pap smear, etc.). Also, it offers a comprehensive suite of analytical tools to their purchasers that improve accuracy, and objectivity. Spectral Insight is a multi-faceted platform with spectroscopy, optics, artificial intelligence, algorithms, knowledge management, visualization, and cloud computing.

Forus Health

Forus Health is created by a bunch of engineers in 2010. it’s a medical technology startup to eliminate evitable blindness. Over the years, they have developed technology solutions to extend affordability and access to eye care. the primary product of the corporate company is 3nethra classic. it’s a portable and compact non-mydriatic complex body part camera used for taking digital pictures of the anterior (cornea) and posterior (retina) segments of the eye.

The device can facilitate to spot of common eye issues akin to glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, cataract, ARMD, etcetera Also, it is integrated with a cloud-based telemedicine platform that allows remote diagnosis. There are 40 million peoples who are blind within the world. In that, 15 million peoples live in India. The major reasons for this drawback are the high price of treatment/surgery, limited access to eye care facilities, and lack of awareness. Forus Health aims to utilize technology to cut back diagnostic costs, increase access, and raise awareness.

Cardiac Design Labs

Cardiac Design Labs is created by Anand Madanagopal in 2011. The headquarters of the corporate is placed in Bengaluru, Karnataka. they provide diagnosis and cardiac monitoring by deploying intelligent systems that provide automatic remote reporting. It saves price and time. They aim to produce advanced diagnostics to the peoples in a reasonable way. the corporate company has created a wearable device named MIRCaM (Mobile Intelligent Remote Cardiac Monitor).

That device will provide real-time cardiac monitoring and diagnosis in remote settings. In India, there are solely 4000 cardiologists for 64 million cardiac patients. Anand Madanagopal believes MIRCaM can bridge this gap. They have a core team of experts, from totally different disciplines, as well as material science engineers, cardiologists, software and system hardware engineers.

Examples from around the world

Electronic vaccine intelligence network (eVIN) — India: India runs the largest vaccination programme within the world with twenty-seven million new babies immunized each year. eVIN is a mobile-based technology developed by the UNDP and therefore the Government of India to lay out real-time logistics management across the vaccine cold chain. The app tracks the location, temperature (from SIM-enabled temperature loggers connected to cold chain equipment), and stock levels of vaccines, guaranteeing the provision is safe and reliable.

Skynet, Alibaba, and Mobile Operators — China: China has financed heavily in health care industry IoT solutions, from digital health records to smartphone attachments reading EKGs and temperatures. Multiply this by 1.4 billion people, and you’ll be able to sense the size of huge data out there for data scientists to crunch on. throughout the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Alibaba was able to implement a Skynet in over 100 cities within a week by investing in smartphone apps and therefore the power of mobile IoT connections. Alipay health code became epidemic prevention and management health code system, that enabled large-scale, real-time observation to support China in its efforts to stem the spread of the virus.

Semtech LoRa fall detection device and network — Europe: Falling may be an alarming prospect for older folks and monitoring patient falls is an essential safety measure used by healthcare suppliers. LoRaWAN provides a low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) to notice falls amongst the elderly, connected to LoRa devices, up to 30 kilometers away. Movement data is collected from the sensors engineered into the LoRa technology and transmitted to the Cloud, wherever algorithms determine if the movement was a fall or not. real-time alerts are sent to healthcare providers to reach patients faster if they fall.

Vonage telemedicine APIs — USA: Using Vonage telemedicine APIs (application program interfaces), hospitals can deploy remote voice, SMS (short message service), and video collaboration tools between doctors and patients. this may help partake with and remotely monitor patients that require isolation. Head-mounted smart-connected cameras can scale back the number of health professionals needed to attend to a patient in an isolation room. Connected remote monitoring with telemedicine can be used for home isolation as well.

Electronic bed management system (eBMS) — Africa: Gauteng hospitals in the Republic of South Africa manage an average of 27.7 million patients annually and infrequently experience access pressures on the supply of beds. Gauteng health services introduced an innovative electronic Bed Management System, that enabled medical professionals to seamlessly determine the availability of beds across a cluster of sites. Results showed a 2-hour reduction within the wait time for a bed, providing patients in Emergency departments timely access to the care in the right setting.

Applications of IoT in healthcare

The rise of IoT is exciting for everyone because of its completely different scope of use in numerous sectors. IoT in health care helps in:

Reducing emergency room wait time
Tracking patients, staff, and inventory
Enhancing drug management
Ensuring availability of important hardware

IoT has also introduced many wearables & devices that have made the lives of patients comfortable.

Hearables

Hearables are new-age hearing aids that have fully transformed the means for people who suffered hearing loss to interact with the world. Nowadays, hearables are compatible with Bluetooth that syncs your smartphone with it. It permits you to filter, equalize and add layered options to real-world sounds. doppler Labs is the most fitted example of it.

Ingestible sensors

Ingestible sensors are genuinely a modern science marvel. These are pill-sized sensors that monitor the medication in our body and warns us if it detects any irregularities in our bodies.

These sensors are often a boon for a diabetic patient as they might help in curbing symptoms and provide an early warning for diseases. Proteus Digital Health is one such example.

Moodables

Moodables are mood-enhancing devices that facilitate improving our mood throughout the day. it may sound like science fiction, however, it’s not far from reality.

Thync and Halo Neurosciences are already engaged in it and have made tremendous progress. Moodables are head-mounted wearables that send low-intensity current to the brain which elevates our mood.

IoT in Healthcare: Futuristic Aspects

The long forecasted revolution of IoT in healthcare is already on its way, although the present applications can simply be considered the tip of the iceberg. The new use cases that are rising to address the requirement for betterment are likely to mark their footprints with the help of breakthrough innovations and ideas. a number of the extremely predicted aspects in which IoT in healthcare is predicted to bloom embody advancements in sensor technologies, enhancements in systems to collect and process data, and integration of artificial intelligence technologies in healthcare.

Smart sensors, a combination of sensors and micro-controllers, assist in harnessing the power of healthcare IoT in terms of accurate measurement, analysis, monitoring, and assessing a large number of parameters in healthcare. On the other hand, the advance in sensor technologies is complemented by developments within the ability to collect and gather data that eliminates manual-data entries, and automation reduces the chance of errors.

the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and its alliance with IoT is one of the important aspects of digital transformation in modern healthcare. The central pairing is probably going to end in rushing up the difficult procedures and data functionalities that are otherwise tedious and time-consuming. AI along with sensor technologies from IoT can lead to better decision-making. Advances in connectivity through artificial intelligence are expected to promote an understanding of medical aid and modify preventive care that guarantees a far better future.

Challenges to IoT in Healthcare

Despite their immense potential to change the healthcare model, the new technologies have specific difficulties associated with their practical implementation. Prevalent challenges revolve around the generation of tremendous data through a high number of devices associated with the system and the threat of cyber-attacks and data breaches. Despite the exciting advancements offered by IoT and AI in healthcare, several medical organizations are cautious about proceeding with these systems. The multitude of information collected in the forms of digital pathology data, diagnostic data, sensor data, EHR data, imaging data, and others leads to excessive deposition of data that are difficult to handle This could lead to unauthorized access of this data by cybercriminals to create fake IDs, smuggle drugs or file a fraudulent insurance claim on the patient’s name. Solutions for data scalability and protection through cybersecurity would address the critical nature of IoT in healthcare boosting its applications and adoption rates in the future.

Conclusion

Though IoT has its challenges, more and more hospitals, doctors, and people are incorporating IoT technologies into their day-to-day activities. the advantages of IoT devices outweigh the potential shortcomings by making hospitals more flexible, advanced, and regulated.

To avoid security breaches and incompatibilities, however, healthcare organizations and facilities ought to thoroughly set up the entire integration process from selecting reliable devices and checking if they’re compatible with current systems to provide constant maintenance and perform regular security checks after IoT systems are integrated.

Authors: Yash Kolhe, Mahesh Nagargoje, Akshada Padalkar, Sunita Patil, Rushikesh Shelke.

Guide: Prof. Deepali Deshpande