IoT in Healthcare: From Clinics to Mobile Apps

In this article, we’ll talk about how the Internet of Things can be used in the healthcare market, what it “brings to the table” to businesses in the industry, and what providers of devices and APIs there are. Additionally, we’ll talk about our expertise with IoT healthcare devices and answer some of the most popular questions on this topic! 🚀

📄 IoT in Healthcare: Use Cases

The Internet of Things has 4 primary areas of use in the healthcare industry:

• patients’ private use;
• physicians;
• hospitals;
• insurance companies.

Additionally, we'll explore compelling instances of IoT in Healthcare applications for each of these use cases.

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.

🤖 IoT Tech Stack for the Healthcare Industry

So you can utilize all the above-mentioned benefits of smart healthcare devices, it’s important to choose trustworthy and reliable providers, especially during the Internet of Things prototype development phase if you're building the device from scratch.

In this section, we'll discuss the various options available on the market and how to select the most suitable provider that aligns with your budget for IoT app development costs. In case you’re building your own device, it still could be useful to read through this section so as to get inspired by the ideas of other providers!

Fitness-Related Activity Trackers & Wearable Medical Devices

Generally, most fitness trackers and smartwatches can play this role without any additional devices. However, there are dedicated devices that track heart rate, saturation, calorie tracking, body composition, sleep, etc. The main benefit of such devices is that they allow more precise measurement, compared to regular fitness bands.

As for smartwatches with such functionality, there are multiple solutions from world-famous providers — Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy Watch, Garmin, Nike Fuelband, Fitbit, and many others. There are also more affordable options from Xiaomi, Huawei or Wyze.

Apart from that, you might want to partner up with companies that have extensive experience in your business area and with your target audience. In case the company offers multiple devices as a package, make sure that it’s possible to buy them separately so you don’t have to pay for unnecessary devices (might seem obvious but not all companies have such an option).

As much as we’d like to know what’s the best provider for your use case, further research is inevitable. If you need more specific help with looking for an Internet of Things development company, feel free to contact us!

💼 IoT in the Healthcare Industry: Our Expertise

Our company has quite extensive expertise in integrating IoT healthcare devices with our clients’ solutions. So, in this section, we’ll talk about it using SportPlus (one of the projects that we’ve worked on) and share some insights with you.

SportPlus provides their clients exercise machines and equipment with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) modules, meaning that you can control them remotely using the dedicated SportPlus app.

The BLE modules collect users’ health data such as heart rate, calorie count, exercise history, dynamics of health metrics, etc. These modules then send the data to the app so users can conveniently access it and discuss it with their physicians if necessary.

However, before getting such health data was possible, we needed to make the app compatible with all of the devices. Initially, most of their fitness devices have different protocols (in other words, language that allows (interpretable) data exchange between machines and humans).

Luckily, each device had an app developed specifically for it. Thus, we were able to collect the data that was generated while using the exercise machines with an already functioning app, find out what protocol is used in each separate case, and set up the SportPlus app accordingly.

❓ FAQs on IoT in Healthcare

To provide you with more details on the topic, we’d like to cover some generic questions on this topic.

# 1: How to Deal with Patients’ Data Privacy?

An important matter when working with digital medical data of your patients’/clients’ is making sure that you use it according to applicable data privacy regulations. Some of the most important ones for healthcare businesses are GDPR and HIPAA.

Firstly, let’s talk about GDPR, which stands for General Data Protection Regulation. Basically, it wasn’t created for the healthcare industry specifically but still applied to any vendor that gathers data of EU citizens, even if the vendor itself is located outside of the Union.

This presentation visualizes some of the most important aspects of GDPR and its principles.

So, to build an IoT healthcare device of your own, you’ll need:

• Hardware elements like sensors and microchips.
• Make sure that each element is of good quality.
• Required technical and coding knowledge.
• To enable communication between your device and the app using a certain protocol (BLE, for example).

These are only a couple of actions — there’s much more to that. By partnering with a certain provider, you significantly reduce time-to-market and reduce costs.

But of course, there are definitely use cases when building your own device is the only option. For example, when there’s simply no such device on the market and you want to bring something completely unique to the market.

At the end of the day, it’s always up to you which way to go. As a development company, the Stormotion team would gladly help you make your ideas a reality!

💡 Takeaways

So, the healthcare sector of the IoT industry is really diverse and has a lot to offer to businesses. By carefully choosing high-quality providers and using the right approach to implementing IoT devices into your workflow or client flow, you can significantly improve the quality of your services.

If you have any questions left or need help with the development of a dedicated app for your IoT healthcare device, feel free to contact us! 🚀