New-Tech Europe | Oct 2016 | Special Edition For Electronica 2016

IoT promises smarter health

Randall Restle, Digi-Key Electronics

type-two diabetes or cancer can be prevented instead of needing acute treatment, this will slow the relentless rise in healthcare costs. In both of these cases, information technology in the form of the Internet of Things (IoT) provides the core of the solution. Wearable sensors and portable monitoring systems have the potential to extend the reach of medical staff out to the home and provide them with the ability to react much more quickly to changes in the patient’s condition and provide more appropriate healthcare. At the same time, because IT can be used to only signal important changes received over the IoT, overall costs are reduced by not having doctors and nurses perform consultations when they are not necessary. Using the IoT, sensors are deployed around the patient’s body to the points where they are needed. These

home and receive instead a series of brief consultations from a nurse or doctor. However, appropriate medical staff is not always close enough to allow travel to a surgery by a patient. Specialist medical staff work in city hospitals but in a developed nation a quarter of the population will live in rural areas and do not find it easy to travel for consultations. The stress of travelling to a surgery to have measurements of heart rate, blood pressure and other physical attributes is stressful in itself and can lead to situations where the patent receives the wrong level of treatment for their actual conditions. If doctors had access to measurements taken over a longer period during real-world activities they would have a much better idea of the patient’s progress. Governments around the world have also come to the realization that if some chronic conditions, such as

Healthcare costs around the world are rising as the population ages. The proportion of the population of the world aged 65 and over is set to double over the next 25 years, from a little over 7 per cent today to 15 per cent. In the developed world, the rise will be even higher as average life expectancy is already higher. Although people will live longer, many will live with chronic medical conditions that require regular treatments and consultations. The result is likely to be a dramatic increase in the cost of healthcare, whether financed by state taxation or insurance costs. A key issue is the amount of time that people need to stay in hospital after a treatment so that they can be observed before receiving more treatment or are considered healthy enough to discharge. Hospital treatment costs are much higher than if the patient can stay at their

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