The use of the internet of things (IoT) in healthcare has immensely increased for the last few years. From advanced medical equipment to smart wearable devices, the entire level of connectivity and innovations in the modern medical have transformed the industry. And this progress stimulates every day, altering all prevalent medical practices.

IoT has paved a world of possibilities in medicine. As it connected to the internet, conventional medical devices now can amass invaluable patients’ data, provide additional information into symptoms and trends, enable remote care, and give patients more control over their diagnoses. The technology has also a major impact on lessening healthcare costs significantly and enhancing treatment outcomes.

By making use of smart devices like wearables and other home monitoring equipment powered by IoT, doctors or physicians can keep track of their patients’ health more effectively. Alongside this, they can track patients’ need for treatment plans or any need for abrupt medical attention. Ultimately, IoT enables medical professionals to be more vigilant and connect with the patients proactively.

Besides monitoring patients’ health, IoT devices are very constructive in hospitals or healthcare centers as these embedded with sensors that can track the real-time location of medical equipment such as wheelchairs, defibrillators, oxygen pumps, nebulizers and other monitoring devices. While the spread of infections is a major concern for a patient in hospitals, IoT-driven hygiene monitoring devices aid in thwarting patients from getting infected.

These devices even assist in asset management like pharmacy inventory control and environmental monitoring, give accurate details of refrigerator temperature, and humidity and temperature control.

Since IoT devices including smartphones, tablets, laptops, digital assistants, among others have already penetrated the industry, this all can share sensitive data, leading concerns over cybersecurity. It has become increasingly a risk factor in health care data. According to Becker’s Hospital Review, data breaches cost the healthcare industry around US$5.6 billion every year. Considering other reports, despite this emerging concern, the adoption rate of the internt of things is on the rise and predicted to grow by approximately 29 percent by 2020.

IoT Applications in Healthcare

As the internet of things has the extensive centralization and interconnection capacity, it enables setting up a centralized network of interconnected devices that can produce and exchange data within a single framework that can be tracked and gathered in real-time.

There are various opportunities IoT applications provide to the field of healthcare and benefit physicians, hospitals, patients, families and insurance companies. The applications include remote patient monitoring, mobile health, smart hospitals, enhanced chronic disease treatment and tracked ingestible sensors.

Thus, the internet of things is undoubtedly transforming the healthcare industry by advancing the medical equipment or devices and by redefining people interaction in delivering healthcare solutions. Looking at the capabilities, IoT has become the core of the digital healthcare filed.