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Wearable devices are the center of attraction for every discussion that aims to define innovation in IoT. The wearable medical devices market is expected to reach USD 14.41 Billion by 2022 from USD 5.31 Billion in 2016, at a CAGR of 18.3% during the forecast period (Source). Technology has enabled users to monitor their health indicators constantly and significantly reduce preventive and monitoring costs. Wearable devices are chosen for this task and are one of the most efficient integrations to telemedicine and telehealth besides the mobile. This article will explore some of this realm’s important aspects.
Let’s Know Wearable Devices Better
The most relevant definition of wearable electronics is the “devices that can be worn or mated with the human skin to constantly and closely monitor an individual’s activities without interrupting user’s motions.”
Today, the range of wearable systems, including micro-sensors, seamlessly integrate into various industries such as textiles, consumer electronics, automatic watches, belt-worn personal computers, and glasses. Due to this, they are now designed to cater to a broader spectrum of applications.
The combination of wearable and health monitoring systems aims to minimize wearable devices’ size, measure vital signs, and send secure and reliable data using smartphones. Hence, one of the obvious applications of wearable systems is monitoring the physiological parameters in the mobile environment.
Application of Wearable Devices in Healthcare
The busy world has led to a life that focuses on shuttling between various tasks. This has caused most of us to ignore one of the most important aspects of our lives, “health and fitness.” A simple health checkup by the doctor requires a plethora of medical examinations followed by prescriptions and treatments that consume a great deal of time. This is probably the most potent reason people only visit a doctor when suffering from illness. The very attitude paves ways to find alternatives, such as a device that can be worn on the body and has the potential to monitor the user’s health in real-time, constantly. These devices should also provide the users and the medical practitioner with insight into various health parameters. Wearables are generally aimed at fulfilling these objectives in the healthcare ecosystem.
- 56% of the Americans use some kind of wearable technology.
- 88% of the physicians want patients to monitor their health parameters at home
- 35% of the employers use medical wearable technology to improve the quality of wellness programs and lower health insurance costs.
- Wearable technology drops hospital costs by 16% over 5 years
Some other applications of wearables IoT in healthcare can be listed as follows.
1. Motion Tracking
Human movement tracking has various valuable applications in sports, medical, and other branches of studies. These applications include fall risk assessment, qualifying sports exercises, analyzing people’s habits, and monitoring them. Wearable trackers are gaining worldwide popularity for their ability to accomplish all these tasks, aid users in performing their daily workouts and help them manage their activity at the tip of their fingers. They also keep the users abreast of their daily motions like distance walked, which enables them to keep track of their activities and ensure a healthy life.
2. Vital Sign Monitoring
This is one of the most crucial applications of IoT in medicine. Constant monitoring has enabled adequate healthcare for patients. More than half of the wearable users believe that technology has improved mental health. Making smart use of complex algorithms and their analysis, wearables foster better medical attention and care for patients in remote areas or places that stay aloof from immediate medical help. Remote patient monitoring saves the healthcare system $200 billion over 25 years. Many wearable devices have been implemented to measure critical elements in the healthcare monitoring ecosystem. These devices include names like an electrocardiogram (ECG) and electroencephalogram (EEG) measurement, skin temperature regulators, etc., and mark the efforts of wearable devices to provide multi-task vital signs measurement.
3. Improve Patient Experience
Seamless connection between the devices has enabled patients to control room temperature and electronics and even communicate with loved ones or call medical assistance with a few clicks. Even the medical practitioners can access the patient’s information on the go through the cloud availability. This has, in turn, facilitated the patients and the medical aids to relish a great user experience.
Challenges Faced by Wearables for medical IoT
IoT devices should be empowered with easy-to-use and robust application access. Worldwide, researchers have proposed multiple platforms and structures that have formed the base of commercial devices available for bio-medical parameter measurement. However, there are still many challenges that need to be addressed. Here are the four key capabilities that are missing from the leading platforms.
1. Simple and Secure Connectivity
A good IoT platform should enable easy connection of devices and perform device management functions on three levels data collection, data transmission to the hub, and permanent storage of observation values to the medical station. The steps should be carried out most securely to ensure accurate data transmission and to protect the data. For this, encryption is necessary.
2. Power Consumption
Power consumption is one of the most crucial things to provide the user with easy device management and long-term, uninterrupted monitoring. These factors can be correlated to the number of parameters being monitored, code efficiency, data packaging, encryption, and compression.
3. Wearability
Wearable devices are specifically designed for biomedical monitoring. This, in turn, assists individuals in living long and healthy lives. This point is more significant when elderly people are using the devices. Therefore, such devices must be easy to use and carry and offer users comfort. These requirements can be easily overcome by making light, small, and well-structured devices that can be used for a long duration.
4. Risk Associated with Data Loss
While the data is being transferred from the collecting element, microcontroller, to the smartphone or cloud storage, there are chances of disconnection that might lead to data loss. A safe health monitoring system must ensure to overcome this shortcoming. One of the potential solutions to this is temporary data saving in the microcontroller.
Conclusion
Wearable devices have been gaining worldwide popularity in diverse fields, including sports and fitness to health monitoring. It has enabled individual tracking of the number of parameters in their living or working environment. The IoT devices and wearables are here to stay. Their popularity and usage are expected to surge significantly over the next few years. As the Giants take it to the forefront of IoT development services It is evident that IoT and wearables will form a major part of the healthcare industry.
