The Internet of Things, a rapidly developing technology sector, involves not only the fields of manufacturing or renewable energy but also sectors such as health, which over the years has been adopting technologies that will allow it to evolve.
Internet of Things, not just industry 4.0
The term industry 4.0 refers to those companies that have embarked on a path of evolution and investments in technologies that allow them to automate and monitor production processes.
The IoT technologies adopted by manufacturing companies and other industrial sectors, are increasingly being used also in other areas, the technological evolution that these products bring make it possible to improve services and performances.
In the health sector, even if slowly, technologically advanced devices are being introduced that will allow hospitals to offer efficient and always cutting-edge services to their patients.
Allied Market Research forecasts that by 2021 the market for IoT technologies adopted in the health sector will reach 136.8 billion dollars, making healthcare one of the major areas of development.
The many tools of the Internet of Things in medicine
At this moment the instruments used in medicine represent technologically advanced and precise objects that allow for example the monitoring of vital parameters, such as the heartbeat, through the use of wearable devices. Every patient equipped with a bracelet is constantly monitored, ensuring timely intervention by medical personnel in the event of emergencies.
This is just a simple example of what IoT devices are able to do in a healthcare environment: in the near future in fact more and more complex technologies will be adopted that will help doctors to improve diagnoses and develop increasingly personalized treatment plans and care givers to to assist their patients in the best post-hospital treatments.
The adoption of more advanced technologies will also allow the monitoring of complex clinical pictures, thus increasing the chances of avoiding greater criticalities, offering an increasingly advanced health service, improving care and reducing economic waste.
A slow but constant evolution of the IOT in the field of medicine
The adoption of technologies in the health sector is slower and more complex than in the industrial sector, this because the instruments must be extensively tested so as to be totally reliable and allow accurate evaluations.
Furthermore, the number of diseases and the different forms that pathologies can take represent an infinity of situations that must be analyzed in different ways: this therefore involves multiple scenarios to be analyzed.
Consequently an accurate study is necessary to find common parameters for each individual scenario, reducing data analysis errors that could generate misleading results and therefore a misdiagnosis or the elaboration of an effective therapy.
The medical field therefore needs more care in finding solutions of this kind, precisely to prevent the impossibility of using a specific instrument on different patients.
Fujitsu's IoT
The Dutch structure Sint Maartenskliniek of Nijmegen, has adopted a technology produced by Fujitsu that deals with helping patients with motor problems, studying for them a rehabilitation path through which they can reach their goals and not just engines.
The project involves the use of wearable devices, which through the positioning on the ankles, wrists and chest of the patients, monitor and collect the data necessary to study a rehabilitation path that allows to speed up recovery times, also improving comfort during the rehabilitation period.
This pilot project, launched in October 2017, represents one of the many areas in which technologies are alongside the healthcare environment, introducing innovation and revolutionizing the sector.
