Development of Smart Healthcare Monitoring with the Telehealth Monitoring Devices
Each year, technology gets smarter. Devices are able to perform, monitor and maintain an increasingly wider pool of tasks, giving us – humans – the time to focus on core responsibilities. Nowhere is this more evident than in the healthcare sector. Smart health technologies are quickly being developed to aid in patient care and improve outcomes. These technologies include the use of wearable, built-in, and mobile sensors that continuously monitor patients for diagnoses and treatments.
Why This Boom?
Back in 2019, activity trackers occupied the largest share of the wearable healthcare devices market, thanks to the affordability of these trackers, sedentary lifestyles and lifestyle diseases, and a sizable number of tracker manufacturers. According to reports, the wearable healthcare devices market, which was worth USD 18.4 billion in 2020, is estimated to reach USD 46.6 billion in the year 2025. Adopting mobile platforms, AI, and 5G as well as an awareness of home healthcare, will drive this demand. Countries like India, China, and Brazil will provide a range of opportunities for stakeholders. What’s more, the Asia Pacific market is pegged to rapidly grow between 2020 and 2025.
How Important Is Smart Health Monitoring?
Traditionally, monitoring takes place when patients are admitted to hospitals and other care settings. Once discharged, they are usually left to their own devices and must monitor themselves. It’s only when things take a turn for the worse that they revisit their physicians who then have them admitted if necessary. This delay can be life-threatening especially with chronically ill patients and those in need of emergency care. Smart health monitoring solves this problem by providing early alerts to physicians about potential medical issues. They can quickly intervene and provide care.
COVID-19 uncovered just how vital smart health monitoring is. As social distancing and quarantining prevailed, frequent hospital visits were also discouraged. This meant that a novel solution had to be created for patients who required routine monitoring. Thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT) – more specifically, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) –connected care, and smart home-based health platforms, contact-based hospital visits are no longer obligatory unless necessary. Using wearable technology and sensors, patient data is transmitted to healthcare providers and analyzed to prescribe treatment. Not only does this save time, it saves lives.
Types of Health Monitoring Systems
Smart health monitoring systems are categorized into three types based on their main hardware components:
- Smartphone-based Health Monitoring System
- Sensor-based Health Monitoring System
- Microcontroller-based Health Monitoring System
Smartphone-based Health Monitoring System
Smartphones contain a host of features that together can help smart health providers develop advanced smart health systems. Prime among these is voice monitoring that is being leveraged to quantify and track vocal hyperfunction in patients with chronic or recurring voice conditions.
Here are a few examples:
- Researchers have tested voice monitoring systems using smartphones with accelerometer sensors. Here, a mini accelerometer acts as a voice sensor while the smartphone functions as a data acquisition platform. The device is worn around the patient’s neck.
- Other researchers have tested systems that use speech synthesis and speech recognition to communicate with patients. The system records semantics and big data from the measurement device and stores it on the phone.
Recently, researchers investigated a smartphone-based breathing monitoring system with the potential to leverage breathing sounds for data acquisition. They proposed that this would be especially beneficial for self-testing for COVID-19 where lungs are compromised and breathing is affected. They used a causal model for this and systems thinking approach to propose a system dynamics model. They stated that with minor fine-tuning, the model would be applied to other smartphone-based monitoring systems through apps that track mental status, heart health, blood pressure, etc.
Resource URL:- https://medtel.io/smart-health-monitoring-revolutionising-digital-health/
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