Patient Health Monitoring System Using IoT, Can It Help ?
After every successful development of any helpful technology, Healthcare is one of the first sectors to implement and take advantage of it. Even though IoT remote monitoring came back in 1982 IoT still didn’t catch up with speed and popularity until the last decade. Now when we are on the verge of meeting 5g there can’t be any better time for hospitals and healthcare facilities to reap the benefits of the Internet Of Medical Things and save millions of lives with Patient Health Monitoring System Using IoT. We have a shortage of healthcare workers in every part of the world. The pandemic made it evident.
This causes excess workload for doctors and healthcare workers making them prone to making wrong decisions, at times which can be life-threatening and can also take down the healthcare centers’ reputation with it. Patient Health Monitoring System Using IoT can help here, Now let’s find out how.
What is exactly Patient Health Monitoring System Using IoT
Monitoring means observing and checking the progress or quality of something over a period of time; keeping it under systematic review. Factories and Warehouses are already taking advantage of IoT remote Monitoring. Here they track the health of the machines and consumables and the asset tracking management also stops things from being stolen or going missing in the facility.
For hospitals, and nursing homes similar kind of IoT is specially built to put into work by checking each and every aspect of patients’ health every time remotely from any place in the world. It includes a bunch of simplest technologies like the following and works for the long term without the need for maintenance.
- wristbands
- connected patches
- small heart-rate calculating sensors
- hygiene monitor
- Temperature monitoring chip, etc.
For example, It stays connected to the patient’s body or in bed tracking the different aspects of that person’s health and even sending notifications to the selected, nearby, or free people of that facility if things are not going normal.
For example, when it tracks down cardio-vascular health it calculates the things like pulse rate, heart rate, blood pressure, mood monitoring, etc. From here if the conditions are not going normal like, if the heart rate is high or low than normal the IoT health monitoring device will send a notification to the cardiologists who were taking care of that patient and to the nurses who were nearby or who were free to at that time. It enables the ability to rapid response. It doesn’t only save many lives but also stops any patient from entering critical condition.
An IoT-based health monitoring system is often connected to a remote cloud server from where it stores the data and all the data processing also happens here. Internet Of Medical Things sometimes consists of nothing but sensors and actuators and it cant process data locally here it has to have a cloud server. The company you are taking your IoMT from must have the cloud server as a service. Here at Kotai Electronics, we provide best-in-class, super fast cloud servers for our customers.
How IoT Based Health Monitoring System Works
Sensors and Actuators- It’s the out-most layer of IoT. Here every component is a physical component. The sensor has many small physical parts that sense the environment and actuators act according to the received data to make changes in the environment. Here examples of it can be pulse sensors & temperature sensors.
Network Layer- The data sent from devices needs a medium to reach the remote cloud servers. The network layer comes into action here. It can be something like WiFi or a Broadband network.
Data Processing Layer- The received raw data gets converted into useful information. It can be as easy as reading the numbers and predicting the temperature or telling if there is an intruder in your house. All the data processing happens here. For simpler tasks usually, there is a headless system like jetson nano or Raspberry Pie. For a huge application or to work in remote places, there stays a cloud server.
The User Interface– After all the data is processed the information needs to be shown to a particular person or a group of people. The user interface in an App or in a website shows the information to the people we have talked about this concept in detail in What Are The Major Components of IoT System article, go check it out.
Advantages and Disadvantages of IoT Powerd Health Monitoring System
Major Advantages of Smart Health Monitoring System using IoT
Remote Monitoring– As the name suggests the very first advantage of the smart health monitoring system is remote monitoring of the health of the people accurately from far away places of the world. It can also send smart alerts.
Preventing serious conditions– Smart sensors track all the conditions 24×7 and also suggest what should someone do to prevent health-depreciation of the patients. This way it reduces the chance of their diseases going to more serious stages
Reduce costs remain the quality– IoMT reduces costly visits to doctors and hospital admissions and makes the tests possible from the comfort of their homes. Making things more and more affordable.
Tracking and understanding data for patients– The whole point of it is “convenience”. When it’s doing this for the doctor’s end why it can’t do this for the patient’s end as well. It helps patients check and stay alert to their health condition and helps doctors make the right decisions.
Error-free treatment- IoT health monitoring system tracks how medicines are working beyond the surface level. It checks how medicines are working in a patient’s body or how it’s not. It can also check if there is an allergic reaction and needs to be treated for that. The cloud stores the past health condition of the patient and this leads to lesser medical errors.
Brings data for future innovation– Humans and machines need to work together in order to get the most benefit of the resources. I might help humans but using only this and forgetting the experience of human doctors will be a big mistake. If we take the data from IoT and combine this with doctors’ experience and knowledge we might come out with new health machines to improve medical sciences even further
Research– Data is all that drives the IoT. These health monitoring devices are able to collect and analyze a massive amount of data, they have a high potential for medical research purposes.
Disadvantages of Smart Health Monitoring System using IoT
Puts privacy at risk– Just like IoT, it is an amalgamation of many technologies together. Having too many endpoints brings the risk of making the attack surface broad. So it brings the risk of security and privacy. IoMT stores data that are super sensitive. All that patient’s health information cant is used to god know where it is the first disadvantage of IoT powered smart health monitoring systems.
Risk of failure– All the new technologies are prone to failure for the first few years after their development. There was a time for airplanes when they are nothing but wooden frames and look at what we have now. There are technologies that are tried and tested but just like any other technology can fail in their task. Another problem can be bugs that come out of nowhere. Also, power cuts can bring issues. Also if people forget to update the software in time it also causes problems.
Initial Cost- It’s true that in the long term IoT based patient health monitoring systems save a lot of money but the initial IoT Development and implementation can go high. Also teaching the hospital staff to use the IoMT devices properly is another cause of costs going up.
We Can Help
If you have gone through all of the amazing ways IoMT can help you and your attention has gotten into and wants to know more about it. Here at Kotai Electronics, As one of the best IoT development companies of India with over a decade of experience, we can help you with that. If you want to know more you can contact us for a Completly Free Consultation today.