IoMT is a collection of medical devices and applications that connect with healthcare IT infrastructure through the internet. Internet-run medical devices connect to allow machine-to-machine communication. They capture, store, and analyze data to facilitate state-of-the-art healthcare facilities such as remote patient monitoring, order tracking, etc.
The global internet of medical things (IoMT) market accounted for USD 24.4 billion in 2019 and is estimated to reach USD 285.5 billion within the next ten years, growing at a CAGR of 28%. Certainly, with the wide array of benefits and increasing impact of COVID-19, IoT adoption is rising at a terrific pace.
But if you are among the ones still wondering how you can benefit from it and implement it. Here is all you need to know.
Let’s start with the basics first,
Table of Contents
Benefits and Use Cases of IoMT Implementation
1. Remote Health Monitoring
Hospitals and their services are not confined to closed spaces today. While patients favor healthcare organizations that offer round-the-clock care services, medical teams work with their IT teams to fulfill their expectations. One such example is remote health monitoring. With this, medical professionals can regularly monitor people with chronic health diseases.
For instance, if there is a patient whose heart rate spikes up at an instance for a certain reason, the same can be communicated timely to the medical professionals. If there is anything to worry about, they can intervene timely and ensure the best care. Here are some areas of iot remote patient monitoring where IoMT can prove to be wonderful:
Glucose Monitoring:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released the National Diabetes Statistics Report that states that more than 130 million USA adults live with diabetes or prediabetes.
For most of these people, regular glucose monitoring is daunting. Manual glucose checking and record-keeping are inconvenient. Simultaneously, the reports only indicate glucose levels at a certain time when the test is provided. There is no way for the medical staff to know fluctuations properly, and data is insufficient to detect a problem.
IoT devices can address this issue by offering patients continuous, automatic glucose monitoring. This helps eliminate manual record-keeping. Besides, medical professionals can easily detect problematic areas and alert patients when needed.
Hand Hygiene Monitoring:
If anything, COVID-19 has made clear its keen focus on ensuring hygiene. Hand hygiene is vital in order to reduce the risk of spreading congestion. Healthcare organizations focus on altering teams to ensure hand sanitization and hygiene using IoMT devices. These devices can also instruct patients and groups on sanitizing hands best and mitigating health risks.
Depression and Mood Monitoring:
Collecting and analyzing information about mental well-being has been tough as always. Healthcare providers only get to communicate with the patients periodically and may be unable to anticipate sudden mood swings. Patients often don’t accurately report their feelings, making it difficult for the medical teams to help them.
Mood-aware IoT devices can help you address these challenges. These devices can infer a patient’s mental health by collecting and analyzing heart rate, blood pressure, eye movements, etc. This data is sent to the medical professionals and helps treat the patients on time.
Parkinson’s Disease Monitoring:
To help patients with Parkinson’s disease, healthcare teams need to have round-the-clock data availability. They need to closely look at how the severity of the symptoms varies throughout the day. IoT sensors allow for this visibility by continuously collecting data about the signs. At the same time, patients don’t need to undergo a thorough examination and yet avail the best treatment.
2. Connected Inhalers
Asthma or COPD is often sudden, without any visible warning signs. This can prove life-threatening to the patients and render healthcare professionals helpless as they don’t have much data to deduce the trigger of fit.
Advanced, IoT-connected inhalers can help patients by monitoring the frequency of attacks and collecting environmental data to help healthcare teams get into the cause of the attack. These inhalers also ensure that the patients receive alerts if they step out of the premise without an inhaler.
3. Ingestible Sensors
What goes inside a human body remains hidden from the outside world. Collecting this data is not only messy but often difficult. With a lack of data, healthcare professionals may not be able to offer the right treatment to the patients and often unable to identify the root cause of the problem.
Ingestible sensors are very small devices that patients can swallow. They can send vital insights into the human body, such as stomach pH levels, source of internal bleeding, etc. With this data in hand, patients can be treated better. These devices are also capable of dissolving easily and passing through the human body.
4. Connected Contact Lenses
Contact lenses have allowed users to obtain perfect vision for a long time now. However, smart contact lenses can make this task a step ahead by offering more than just a better vision. They can capture and produce digital images for the users and support diabetes and strokes patients to keep their healthcare teams updated. These lenses measure chemicals in the tear fluids to monitor light, temperature, and glucose. This data can be sent to the healthcare providers for better patient care.
5. Robotic Surgery
IoT-powered robotic systems operate by connecting physical, network, and application layers. The physical layers combine all the sensors that collect vital health information from patients via smart devices. The robots connect to form a multi-robot network of these sensors and actuators. The application layer contains the data from the physical layer via the network layer to perform specific tasks.
How can You Implement IoMT for Your Healthcare Services?
1. Understand if your Business is Ready for IoT
IoT implementation begins with understanding how IoT will fit into your business. It would be best to strategize how you will manage and collect the growing amount of data, what changes are required for the business model, and how you will cope with the technology changes. You might consider asking the following questions:
Do you have the right healthcare solutions to manage the data pool?
IoT healthcare solutions can only deliver the expected results with the right set of data. This data only grows with time. Therefore, while saving this data, you also need to ensure the right configuration and architecture with regulatory compliance like HITECH, HIPAA, and ETSI.
Is your security infrastructure ready for new challenges?
The growing number of connected devices also puts you at risk of data theft. Therefore, you need to ensure that your data is protected by advanced solutions powered by encryption, blockchain, cybersecurity frameworks, etc.
How will you integrate existing healthcare ERPs with the new solutions?
It is important to design standardized interfaces and solutions that allow seamless data exchange without compromising the existing systems. You need to ensure that your solutions maintain uniformity and work efficiently without delays.
2. Shortlist a Healthcare IoT Development Company
The next step is to find the right partner to build an IoT system for your healthcare organization. Here is what to look for when shortlisting potential technology partners:
Once you have a detailed plan in hand, you can reach out to the top development companies in your area who will now shape it. While shortlisting the companies, check for metrics such as:
- How much experience do they hold in the area of healthcare development?
- What is their experience in developing applications in IoT realm?
- What is the quality of the solutions they have delivered?
- How have their clients rated them for their services?
- What additional USPs do they have?
3. Start with IoT Development
Once you have the right technology partner by your side, you can start with the development and deployment of the product. An expert healthcare software development provider will complete the process in the following steps:
Wrapping Up
IoMT is taking the healthcare industry by storm. Let’s help you make the best of it with our expert IoT development services. Besides an expert team that enables full-fledged implementation, we offer benefits such as:
- A rich portfolio that speaks of our quality
- Delighted clients who vouch for our services
- Cost-effective, flexible pricing models
- Extensive range of development services
- Agile development methodology
- Round-the-clock team availability
And a lot more. To explore, share your requirements with us right away!
