IoT has brought a sea change in different sectors, and health is no exception. The incorporation of IoT in healthcare the Internet of Medical Things-has brought a revolution to patient care, particularly to patient monitoring. In India, where healthcare access may be poor in rural areas and healthcare resources are highly stretched, IoT-driven solutions play a crucial role in improving patient outcomes.
IoMT Growth in Healthcare
The IoMT is a connected ecosystem of devices, sensors, and applications in healthcare that collect and transmit data to providers in real-time. It is one technology that enables continuous, remote patient monitoring and enhances preventive and predictive capabilities for caregivers. Indeed, this makes sense as industry forecasts estimate that the global remote patient monitoring market will reach 175.2 billion dollars by 2027, an affordable increase considering that the burden of using connected devices for the monitoring and managing of health conditions remotely increases. This is very consequential for India, with its very huge population and comparative shortage in healthcare infrastructure in some parts of the country. IoT now enables the continuous monitoring of patients by hospitals and doctors in real-time without the need for frequent visits to hospitals. This is very essential in cities and villages for the patients.
Improving Patient Monitoring in India
Such IoT devices are being used to monitor a myriad of health parameters, including blood pressure, glucose levels, heart rate, and even oxygen saturation.
This especially helps in the management of chronic diseases, such as diabetes and cardiovascular conditions, that are so prevalent in India. For example, connected wearable devices can monitor the glucose levels of a diabetic patient continuously and send alerts to both the patient and healthcare professional once the levels go out of the safe range. This can go a long way in reducing hospital admissions and overall improvement in the quality of life for patients.
Other innovations in the works include ingestible sensors and smart inhalers. Ingestible sensors, taken orally by patients, provide important information about digestive health, while smart inhalers enable those with asthma and COPD to track their medication use as well as tap into environmental triggers of the disease.
This is quite evident, as the IoMT solutions are getting rapidly adopted in the Indian healthcare market. Certain primary areas where this trend is being noticed include preventive healthcare; with IoT-enabled wearables and sensors, patients take a front-row seat to monitor their health status and adopt positive steps to prevent the aggravation of their health. IoT-driven preventive care has reportedly brought down hospital readmission rates by as much as 50% in some instances.
A recent research estimated that healthcare will be the largest sector generating data due to IoMT devices by 2025. This tsunami of data is both a challenge and an opportunity in India. The challenge is how healthcare systems will manage, analyze, and store securely the data continuously generated. On the other hand, the opportunity for leveraging this data toward predictive analytics and personalized care is huge.
Improved chronic disease management: Continuous monitoring of vital signs promotes the management of chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension. For example, it allows wearables to notify doctors and patients if their parameters show irregularities so that proper treatment can be sought in due time.
Cost Reduction: IoT-powered real-time monitoring and predictive analytics reduce healthcare costs by preventing complications and avoiding unnecessary hospitalization. In addition, the adoption of connected devices for care providers helps in improving their workflows and hence providing resource development tasks more effectively.
Personalized Treatment: IoT enables the collection of huge volumes of data about patients, and therefore, it significantly enables personalized treatment. For instance, through this, pharmaceutical companies can monitor compliance, modifying therapies according to the conditions.
Issues in IoT Adoption
So, though IoHT has its benefits, its adoption into healthcare bears a number of bottlenecks in India. The majority of the processes are not standardized across hospitals and clinics.
Different devices have different communication protocols, and hence, aggregating or analyzing that data from such devices is a challenge. Then, of course, there is the issue of data security. Considering the amount of sensitive information an IoT device can collect about patients, it is a target for cyberattacks, and the only thing that protects the patient data is investment in robust security measures. Apart from this, the other challenge is that many Indian hospitals have outdated infrastructure that cannot handle this volume of data emanating from those devices.
The lack of technology-savvy professionals in healthcare also complicates the application of IoT technologies in everyday medical practices. Future of IoT in Indian Healthcare It would appear that the future of healthcare in India is bright since IoT is still evolving. Such government initiatives as Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission will definitely go a long way in integrating IoT solutions into a digital health ecosystem for better care of patients.
In addition to that, telemedicine, which has attained a faster pace because of COVID-19, has quickened the pace of IoT adoption in remote patient monitoring. IoT can definitely bridge the gap in rural and urban healthcare delivery for a country like India, where healthcare resources are most of the time strained. In this way, timely and quality care could be provided to the patients irrespective of their geographical barriers. If the healthcare sector overcomes the challenges of data security and standardization, with the help of IoT, full potential in improving the outcomes of patients may be realized.