IoT in Healthcare and Advances in Remote Patient Monitoring

Remote Health Monitoring Using IoT

Existing patient monitoring systems are fixed monitoring systems, which are only available in hospital ICUs. These systems are huge in size and useful to monitor patients in hospital beds only. No automatic system exists which is able to regularly provide important data about the patient when he or she is mobile. Medical assistance, health monitoring, and rehabilitation for the older and disabled people is an imminent challenge, as it requires an ideal network between people, medical equipment and health service providers. For this reason, reliable and cost-effective wearable devices with low-power are needed to enhance their quality of life. The IoMT framework offers promising innovative advances to accomplish before the specified patient care services and enhance further the health service systems.

Based on the assistance of the remote health monitoring framework, health parameters can be self-assessed by sitting at home and the information can be shared with a qualified doctor who is far away. If a patient is suffering from a major medical ailment, and the specialist treating the patient is unable to help, these parameters can be remotely sent to a doctor who can help him/ her from any location. In the worst case, even if the treatment isn’t accessible in his/ her country, he/she can communicate and continue the treatment with a specialist from a technically advanced country. Thus, mortality rates can be decreased, and the quality of care can be enhanced using remote health monitoring with IoMT.

Benefits of Remote Patient Monitoring

Remote patient health monitoring (RPHM) is continuing to gain acceptance in hospitals and healthcare centres, and many specialists are expressing interest in the next generation platforms to address the challenges and inefficiencies of the current patient monitoring platforms. Research surveys are stating that the RPHM market is growing rapidly, and in this context the advantages for patients, care providers and public health authorities are outlined below:

Benefits for patients:

• Better outcomes and quality in treatment
• Real-time support and interventions improve the disease management and reduce errors
• Prevent emergencies and re-admissions
• Reduced hospital stays

Benefits for Care Providers/ Public Health Authorities:

• Enhance the access of patient health data in real time
• Continuous monitoring of patient health parameters, regardless of patient’s location
• The accuracy, reliability and relevance in reading data enhanced, which would provide better precision in treatment
• Cost reduction from re-admissions and hospital stays

IoT in healthcare can monitor, record and track the changes in parameters over a specific time period. Doctors can prescribe the medication and suggest treatment methods based on the recorded changes or the history of the patient. Normal routine check-ups and hospital stays can be minimized. Digital records of patient health parameters on the clouds are becoming reliable and storing data in a computer or memory device has benefits over printing on paper such as minimal chances of data loss.

Limitations and Challenges of IoMT in Healthcare

The successful implementation of IoMT based remote patient monitoring systems face certain limitations and challenges in terms of technology and networking such as accurate data acquisition, inter-operability between hardware and software, bandwidth, quality of health services, limitation of battery life, sensor biocompatibility and so on.

The significant challenges in the domain of IoMT are design in hardware and software implementation, design optimization of wearable sensors and real-time processing with low power consumption sensors. Network performance is likely to be constrained in the memory of the system, which influences the performance and management of network-like devices, as well as bandwidth and flexibility of data volume, data security and data privacy. In addition to the network and technological challenges, the most common and general challenges are user attitudes, technological acceptance and barriers, confidentiality, legal issues, ethical and administrative barriers, implementation costs, maintenance of the system and sufficient investments.

Overcoming these difficulties in the area of IoMT will enhance the standard of remote healthcare. IoMT provides better and reliable healthcare and health monitoring services, as it bridges the gap between doctors, patient and healthcare services. IoMT enables the doctors and hospital staff to work more precisely and actively with less effort.

This article was cited from Medical Big Data and Internet of Medical Things: Advances, Challenges and Applications, By Aboul Ella Hassanien, Nilanjan Dey and Surekha Borra.