Did you know that only 40% of asthma patients benefit from common asthma drugs? With an IoT platform, prescribing personalized medicine to the patient becomes easier than ever before. Personalized medicine is no longer just an added advantage, but a necessity for medical professionals across the globe.
With the confluence of IoT and healthcare, personalized healthcare has taken giant leaps by providing life-saving benefits to patients and better patient care outcomes to healthcare service providers. Advances in medical research have led to the development of precision medicine, which can help doctors administer the right treatment plan to the right patient at the right time.
In this article, we’ll break down exactly how IoT and Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) enabled platforms can improve patient satisfaction through personalized healthcare. We’ll also look at some challenges and how we can solve them.
What is Personalized Healthcare?
Healthcare providers used to function with a “one-size-fits-all” approach until quite recently. However, with advances in our understanding of human and disease biology, along with technological advancements – medical practitioners understand that administering targeted medications was far more effective.
Now, however, with rapid advancements in diagnostic technology and digitization of health records, we stand on the cusp of a new medical era – that of personalized medicine.
Personalized healthcare draws data from a range of sources like clinical records, personal medical histories, real-world experiences, and IoT-enabled diagnostic tools to administer “the right drug with the right dose at the right time to the right patient”.
For example, with predictive gene analytics, doctors can now predict the risk of breast cancer accurately in 6 out of 10 cases. Compare this with 1 out of 10 without personalized medicine.
Key IoT-enabled Personalized Healthcare Solutions and Use cases
So, how exactly do IoT-enabled devices and IoMT platforms deliver timely personalized healthcare? Here are some of the most popular use cases.
Remote Patient Monitoring for Real-time Updates
Remote patient monitoring is one of the fastest-growing real-world applications of IoT, with 115 million patients expected to opt for it by 2027. Remote patient monitoring can particularly help manage chronic diseases, senior care, and even remote clinical trials. It also enhances access to healthcare and significantly reduces costs and in-person visits.
Customized Treatment Plans
The wide variety of live data that physicians can now access from IoT-enabled devices allows them to create customized treatment plans based on the patient’s medical history, known allergies, and lifestyle factors.
For example, doctors could monitor the insulin levels of a senior diabetic patient in real-time without having to wait for periodic checks. The physician can proactively prescribe diet or medication changes to enhance patient care and patient satisfaction.
Tailored Personal Emergency Response Systems
Personal emergency response systems have become extremely crucial. And IoT systems can speed up personal emergency responses by proactively monitoring vitals and sending alerts to the right staff. For example, if you’re a senior care provider, an advanced fall detection system can alert staff at the right time to ensure proper treatment is provided.
Predictive Analytics for Preventive Care
The data generated by the vast network of interconnected IoT devices can power predictive analytics with the use of LLMs and AI models. This has multiple applications.
For patients, these analytics could prove lifesaving by studying patterns found in health data and can help in early detection of diseases.
For hospitals and device manufacturers, analytics can ensure enhanced lifespan of medical equipment like ventilators and medical devices, thus reducing downtime.
Enhanced Drug Management Systems
Whether it’s smart pills or an IoT platform that can monitor medical adherence – medical practitioners can now benefit from advancements in drug management systems. Patients can now get timely alerts or notifications to take their medication and manage their dosage at the right time.
IoT for Surgical Care
IoT has also enhanced surgical care in many ways. First, IoT platforms have enabled telesurgery, where surgeons can remotely operate robotic systems to perform complex surgeries. Further, smart ingestible devices can monitor complex vitals during surgery to enable surgeons to make life-saving decisions during the procedure. Finally, the integration of IoT tools in surgery can improve precision and shorten recovery time.
IoT for Improving Mental Health Care
This is an upcoming trend, especially with a global increase in mental health disorders over the past decade. Remote sensors combined with MLMs can monitor vital health data like stress levels, mood, physical activity, heart rate, and environmental data to create personalized treatment plans for depression, anxiety disorders, etc. Telehealth can also vastly improve suicide prevention through timely interventions.
Challenges for IoT in Healthcare
While the potential of IoT in personalized healthcare is just beginning to be tapped, there are significant challenges ahead of us too. Some of the most significant challenges are:
- Complexity and interoperability of IoT networks: As your network scales up, the vast number of devices and the sheer volume of data makes IoT systems quite complicated. Finding the right technical expertise is crucial to prevent this issue.
- Privacy and security concerns: When large gigabytes of sensitive personal health data are stored and transmitted – security and privacy remain a great priority. Ensuring data privacy and preventing breaches is a significant concern of all of us in the IoT industry.
- Data accuracy and overload: The sheer volume and velocity of data transmitted by devices can create issues, especially if your analytics isn’t trained to ignore irrelevant data.
Choose the Right Partner for Your IoT Healthcare Journey
At Bridgera, we bring over a decade’s experience in serving clients from the healthcare industry – including Healthcare device manufacturers, hospitals, senior and home care providers and clinical trial organizations.
Each layer of our white-label IoT platform is customized with our client’s needs at the forefront. We’ll make your health tech work, while you focus on saving lives. We’ll give you a Proof of Concept (PoC) within two weeks or less.
About Bridgera: Bridgera effortlessly combines innovation and expertise to deliver cutting-edge solutions using connected intelligence. We engineer experiences that go beyond expectations, equipping our clients with the tools they need to excel in an increasingly interconnected world. Since our establishment in 2015, Bridgera, headquartered in Raleigh, NC, has specialized in crafting and managing tailored SaaS solutions for web, mobile, and IoT applications across North America.
About Author: Krishna Varma is a writer and researcher, who enjoys writing about technology, IoT, and lifestyle. When she isn’t writing and reading, you’ll find her relaxing with a quiet cup of tea over the weekends.