IoT in Healthcare

The healthcare industry is undergoing a huge transformation. With the introduction of new IOT devices like FitBit and Livongo, health care is changing from visits to the hospitals and clinics, to diagnoses from your phone or social media. Traditional healthcare systems might be subject to imminent extinction, thanks to the aggressive digitization that has taken over the industry.

The key word that we believe characterizes this change is ‘connections.’ People are becoming more connected with their body, as they can visualize and track all aspects of their health and wellness. The physician and patient are better connected as the doctor now has access to health data that goes beyond the annual checkup and past health records. The business and employees are more connected as employers now have a way of tracking the well-being of their employees.

We are starting to see the development of software services that are changing the industry to the connected healthcare network. Healthcare API companies offer a platform to build apps on, while providing storage and analytics for IOT device data. Wellness apps collect health data from a variety of connected IOT devices and analyze it within the app. Remote patient monitoring packages allow for doctors and caregivers to track continuously and in real time a patient’s vitals, and other conditions like blood glucose and oxygen levels. We believe these developments signal a huge change in medical care as we know it. The goal for technology and data-focused companies like Clairvoyant, in this medical revolution, is to embody the change that is happening and help build more connections between patient and physician, patients and their data, and businesses and their employees. Rather than just providing an API platform, or keeping everything contained to an app, we believe the best service will be a cloud-based connection service with an intuitive UI to integrate users into the system. This will allow care providers and hospitals to easily manage their many users with real-time, seamlessly transferred data. With respect to building connections between the patients and their data, the best user experience will be to get notifications through a variety of social media and personal devices so that patients are completely connected and informed about their body.

By building these connections, our vision is to usher in a new wave of specialized and individualized medical care.  An ecosystem of IT service providers, data technology companies, and wearable device manufacturers is looking to integrate electronic health records (EHR) into this analytics platform. With large volumes of collected data from these devices over a population in a defined time interval, the analytics and prediction engines will become much more adept at recognizing conditions and making recommendations. Coupled with a real-time stream from IOT devices, as well as more sophisticated vital monitoring systems will bring about a ‘digital health monitor’ for each person. Helping create this digital health monitor thereby reducing cost, of monitoring with real-time actionable data triggers is in our long-term vision for the next level of healthcare.

A digital health monitor that is continuously monitoring body signals through data streams from IOT devices triggers multiple alerts to healthcare providers, caregivers, family etc based on the individual triggers and health condition. This would lower costs and time of individual care while providing instant response and support across different health conditions. Some might view this as only useful to those who have a chronic condition and need constant monitoring, but we believe this anticipates a new wave of preventative medicine. Even healthy people can minimize visits to the doctor by analyzing their digital twin data and predicting if some vitals point to a dangerous condition. The vast stores of patient health data will reveal trends in conditions and the digital twin will warn you before the illness sets in.

The beginning of this new age of medicine is being ushered in by today’s healthcare platforms for IOT devices. We are looking to better build these connections from your body to the doctor to the caregiver and back to yourself to help you better understand your own health and bring in a new age of medicine.