Internet of Things in Healthcare: Benefits, Challenges, Use Cases

The Internet of Things has a lot to offer to many industries, with healthcare being amongst the ones that benefit the most. Probably, it’s not the variety of devices itself but how useful and multi-purpose they are.

Take heart rate tracking devices. They’re suitable for private use while exercising, for example. Hospitals and physicians can also use them to track their patients’ well-being and health state. Moreover, health insurance companies can tailor their insurance plans to the needs of their clients if users decide to share such data.

So, whatever business you have, it’s likely that you can use IoT healthcare devices to provide better services. Luckily, you don’t have to bother building your own IoT device — there are hundreds of third-party providers you can partner up with.

Step 2: Data Digitization

Analog data coming from the IoT devices, for example, heart signs, mobility, or environmental conditions, is aggregated and turned into digital format. This step is crucial for ensuring the processing and analysis of the data.

Step 3: Cloud Migration

After the data is digitized, it undergoes preprocessing and standardization processes that make it suitable for analysis. The data is then moved to a cloud data center, which makes it easy to scale the storage and access from anywhere, enabling remote monitoring and analysis.

Step 4: Insight Extraction

This final step involves applying sophisticated analytics to the processed data to develop relevant insights. Healthcare providers can use this information for various purposes, including diagnosis, real-time patient monitoring, and intelligent treatment protocols. This capability can contribute to more patient-focused care through targeted and speedy interventions.

🤔 Pros/Cons of IoT in Healthcare

The implementation of the Internet of Things in the medical field has clear benefits. Let's examine them in more detail with the help of our UI/UX Designer, Iryna 👇

With all its pros and cons, we, at Stormotion, strongly believe that IoT is moving healthcare in the right direction.

IoT for Patients’ Private Use

This group of users mostly benefits from small wearables that they carry around or have on throughout the day without experiencing major inconveniences. For example, bands and bracelets, rings, headbands, glucometers, or maybe even subdermal devices.

The main health metrics that can be tracked, including in women's health tracking app development, are heart rate, blood pressure, glucose levels, various activity tracking like steps and walking distance, calorie count, etc.

Apart from that, patients can also use such devices to oversee their elder relatives. For example, if they require urgent medical attention and nobody’s around to notice it, the device and notify users about the issue so they take actions accordingly.

There are also patients with chronic medical conditions like asthma or diabetes. They benefit from IoT healthcare devices a lot since it helps with tracking the course of the condition and thus, helps to improve treatment.

Private usage is closely connected with fitness and exercising since a lot of these metrics play a crucial role in customizing workouts. In fact, we have a separate article dedicated to the IoT in the fitness industry if you’d like to learn more specifics about the topic:

Let’s take a look at the first case study of how IoT healthcare devices can be privately used:

IoT for Healthcare Professionals

Another target audience of IoT healthcare devices is medical professionals who use such devices in their work. Surely, the main purpose of it is remote monitoring (for example, home monitoring systems) of the patients.

With the help of them, they can track how patients’ bodies respond to certain treatments, or change of them, whether or not it has any damaging side effects, etc. Practically, it's a 24/7 overview of patients’ health to make sure that everything goes as prescribed.

Additionally, physicians can get notified if a patient requires immediate medical help. Take stroke, for example. Often, such a condition occurs without people noticing it at all, but a high-quality IoT healthcare device can track even the smallest abnormalities and report them to physicians.

Physicians or nurses can also use the devices to remind patients to take medications in case they forget about that. For example, if a patient forgets to tick off a certain meds intake and the doctor notices it, they can send them an additional reminder through a dedicated app (which a lot of IoT devices come with to enable the device’s control).

Surely, there are also devices for automated patient onboarding, which includes getting to know patients’ medical history, navigating through clinics’ services and available medical procedures, billing them for services, performing medical insurance-related operations, etc.

The next case study is dedicated to how healthcare professionals can use wearable alarms:

IoT for Hospitals

Hospitals can enhance patient care and operational efficiency through companion application development, utilizing IoT devices in ways that are uniquely beneficial to hospital settings. Firstly, healthcare facilities can use it for keeping track of medical equipment and hospital machinery using devices with location tracking functionality. Plus, such devices can be attached to wheelchairs to ensure the security of those patients who use them.

Such devices are generally really useful for organizational purposes since there are a lot of them targeted at automating managerial tasks like registering people entering the hospital, tracking employees working hours, etc.

Another major use case is hygiene controlling and monitoring. This means that whenever there’s a spread of any infection or concentration of bacteria, the IoT devices with scanners determine it and notify the employees.

Last but not least, such devices can be used for pharmacy inventory control and environmental management like keeping track of drugs, checking temperatures in refrigerators or other temperature-dependent machines, controlling humidity, etc.

Let’s take a look at a fascinating IoT-based device that’s perfectly suitable for hospitals:

IoT for Health Insurance Companies

In healthcare app development, clients’ health data collected via IoT devices can be strategically used by insurers for various purposes. Firstly, it’s useful when underwriting treatments and for claiming operations. This is a great way to make sure that there’s no fraud from the side of clients.

However, it’s important here to still provide needed medical attention since not every condition can be detected by smart devices. Even though implementation of such devices would bring transparency to the insurance company-client relationship, each body is unique and requires a personalized approach.

But before getting the data, crucial for various applications including those pondering how to make a yoga app, it’s important to make your clients willing to share it. For that matter, you can use various gamification features and incentives like merch, discounts, special insurance plans, unique icons and stickers for the app, etc.

To sum it all up, all healthcare industry stakeholders benefit from IoT devices in some way or another. Depending on what a certain device serves, the advantages can vary from cost reduction asset management automation to significant treatment improvements and faster diagnosis.

However, for healthcare matters, you might want something dedicated, something you can be 99,9% sure will measure precisely. A dedicated device for heart rate monitoring is provided by Polar, for example. What’s great about the Polar sensor is that you can connect it to other smart devices via Bluetooth (you should evaluate the BLE vs Bluetooth Classic effectiveness) and ANT+ (wireless data transferring protocols). A similar band can be bought from Peloton.

Plus, it doesn't necessarily have to be a wristband. Wahoo is one of those companies that offer chest straps for heart tracking.

Some companies offer dedicated tracking devices for various kinds of sports. Even though a lot of them are designed for running and cycling, you can definitely find something for any sporting activity. Garmin, for example, offers HRW-Swin chest straps for swimmers.

There are devices for tracking other health indicators as well:

• Saturation: Vive Health, iChoice. These devices are smart finger clips.
• Body composition: most smart devices in this category are smart scales — Renpho, Xiaomi, Wyze. We should mention though that there’s controversy within the community on how precise such scales can function.
• Sleep: Oura Ring, Sleepon, Sleepscore devices.

Patient Control & Remote Monitoring

Apart from monitoring generic health metrics, some patients, especially those using services from psychological therapy app development, require special monitoring due to their medical conditions, including chronic ones. Luckily, the IoT in the healthcare industry has enough devices to offer for most chronic diseases.

COPD and Asthma

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma are amongst the top 4 most prevalent chronic diseases (most research pieces put COPD or asthma on the list, depending on the region).

The main way of dealing with such diseases so that people can have normal lives is inhalers. Nowadays, the IoT industry offers multiple smart inhalers that work via the dedicated app. Let’s take a closer look at these options.

The first provider we’d like to mention is Digihaler. There are two smart inhalers from the company — AirDuo and ProAir. The first one is targeted at 12-year-olds or older to control asthma symptoms and prevent signs of pulmonary disease such as wheezing, for example. ProAir is suitable for a younger audience (4+ years old) and has special emphasis on preventing and relieving bronchospasms.

The functionality includes keeping track of inhaler usage frequency and inhalation strength, getting instant feedback based on such data, and visualizing dynamics to track deteriorations as well as improvements.

Another stakeholder that works with both asthma and COPD is Propeller. The main difference for the previous provider is that the company offers attachable sensors, meaning you can use it with any inhaler of your choice. The functionality varies from inhalation counter to analyzing reasons for symptom flare ups.

It additionally provides location tracking so you can find your inhaler or sensor if you lose them, inhalation reminder, air quality analysis, and weather-related and seasonal recommendations.

Diabetes

Diabetes is (sadly) another widespread chronic disease — over 450M people suffer from this medical condition to a certain level. Luckily, the community’s actively working towards improving an already existing supply of smart diabetes management devices. Let’s talk about what’s already available on the market.

As of now, one of the most advanced smart Internet of Things technologies for healthcare is sensors inserted under patients’ skin, with or without insulin pumps. We’re talking about Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) systems that allow measuring glucose level every couple of minutes throughout the whole day.

Medtronic provides one of the classic CGM smart systems. The device is suitable for people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes. The functionality includes measuring glucose levels, predicting highs and lows, visualizing glucose levels dynamics, etc. Additionally, clients can purchase insulin pumps that will automatically control insulin levels and keep them on needed levels.

Omnipod also offers a whole insulin management system. The functionality is quite similar, tracking and controlling insulin levels, sending reminders, and so on. The amount of insulin that the device contains is enough for 3 days of continuous insulin issuing.

The next provider we’d like to talk about is Eversense. The company has been one of the first ones to offer smart CGM systems with implantable insulin pumps. What’s unique about the device is that it can last for up to 3 month without having to reinsert it.

Surely, all the data can be shared with a doctor and used for further treatment plan improvements or supportive therapies.

Ingestible Sensors

Most of us would agree that getting such invasive examinations as colonoscopy isn’t the most pleasant experience. Fortunately, the IoT industry has an alternative — small ingestible devices with sensors and cameras that allow doctors to diagnose patients without having to “invade” their guts.

The first provider we’ll talk about is Pillcam Colon from Medtronic. They offer a small capsule that scans, records, and takes pictures of the colon. After getting the data, the device immediately transfers it to a computer or other device.

There’s a healthcare technology called Ingestible Micro-Bio-Electronic Devices (IMBED). Firstly, it’s able to detect inner bleedings. The way such devices function is quite a complex scientific matter so we won’t get into detail here. Long story short, the devices contain biosensors that generate light when getting into contact with a certain bacteria. The light detector in the device detects it and then commands the transmitter to generate data and send it to the dedicated IoT applications for healthcare on an external device.

You can take a look at the research we’ve used for this abstract by following this link.

Medication Intake Management

So that doctors don’t have to worry about patients taking the medications as prescribed, there are various IoT healthcare devices that help to manage this process. First, let’s talk about Pillsy. The company offers a smart pills bottle that works as an automatic dose tracking device. The functionality includes sending reminders to take the meds, double dose alerts, notifying the caregiver which can be set up in settings, location-based snoozing (if patients aren’t near their bottle, they’ll be notified once they’re in range).

Another option is the automatic medication dispenser from PharmRight called Livi. When it’s time to take the medication, the green button is supposed to light up (of course, the timing can be set up according to the doctor’s prescription). After users press the button, the meds get dispensed.

It has several dispensing modes and enables high-level customization, allowing to load up doses that should last up to 90 days of daily pills intake.

Elderly Care

Technically, a lot of devices listed above can be used for elderly care, even though it’s not what they initially were designed for. Heart rate trackers can function well as devices for preventing heart failures, especially strokes, which are more likely to happen to seniors.

Medication intake management systems are also perfectly suitable for older people since they suffer from problems with memories more often than younger people. Ingestible sensors are also a great solution for working with elderly — since the older people get, the lower their pain tolerance is (research paper on this statement). Meaning, physicians can avoid painful procedures by replacing them with innovative healthcare tech stack.

Additionally, you can partner with smart emergency button providers (like DevelCo or Akuvox) as part of the elderly case business if that’s your case. Such devices can be set up to send emergency signals to ambulance, police, other institutions, or designated users. This will notify them that the person requires immediate medical help if the person isn’t able to make a call, for example.

Clinics Management & Automation of Administrative Processes

Apart from monitoring and controlling patients’ health, there are many other areas where healthcare IoT devices can be very useful. The one we’d like to talk about is automating administrative tasks and asset management.

The first provider we’ll talk about is GYANT that offers chat-based AI products. It can be used to collect clients’ medical history, navigate them through available services, send follow-up questions regarding their well-being and treatment effectiveness, etc.

In fact, you don’t have to look for separate providers for different management purposes — there are multiple vendors that offer complex solutions that include most necessary devices for asset management. Let’s take Zebra as an example.

Their offer includes mobile computers to perform management, smart RFID sets (readers, sleds, and antennas), desktop and industrial RFID printers, etc.

CenTrak is another provider that has a whole lot of healthcare IoT solutions for asset management, hygiene control, infant security, environmental monitoring, emergency and nurse calls automation, infection control, etc.

How to Choose Suitable IoT Healthcare Providers?

Finding the right partner with high-quality Internet of Things medical devices is as important as perfectly planning out your own business. We’d recommend taking the following factors into account when looking for a partner:

• Price range.
• Post-contract support.
• Diversity of services.
• Reviews, feedback, and references.
• Onboarding guidance & others.

Another important regulation is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It standardizes health-related information protection and its management in the USA. It includes what treatment patients get prescribed, their condition itself (including its future improvement/depreciation), etc.

We have an article where we review these 2 regulations (plus PIPEDA) in detail and talk about how to comply with them if you’d like to have more information on this topic:

# 2: Is Building your own IoT Device Worth It?

To put it simply, our team believes that there are plenty of reliable third-party providers of IoT healthcare devices on the market so that you don’t have to build your own one. However, it surely is an option. Let’s talk about what you might need for it.