Millions of individuals all around the globe are affected by chronic illnesses such as diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular ailments.
- As a result, there is a high need for a strong basis for developing wearable IoT technologies to deploy large-scale wearable sensors that are networked with distant medical infrastructure in order to improve the efficacy and effectiveness of treatment results.
Below, we describe a novel system science for WIoTs that includes operational and clinical elements to recommend future directions:
Healthcare Wearable Design that is Patient-Friendly.
Consumer usability studies have influenced the design of new wearable devices.
For example,
- A wrist accelerometer disguised as jewelry, or wrist-watches,
- The creation of interactive interfaces based on pre-existing touchscreen utilities,
- And the abstraction of information provided to patients that borrow from tried and tested kiosks and other similar Human-Interface systems.
Patients can engage with these systems and feel as though they can change some of the settings themselves.
Furthermore, both publicly financed health systems and commercial health insurance companies are engaged in increasing patient health and activity levels via preventative healthcare efforts.
Some private insurance firms may even provide incentives to promote the usage of pedometers and reward positive health outcomes at yearly exams.
Patient-Physician Interaction is a term that refers to the interaction between a patient and a physician.
- Doctors nowadays want to keep an eye on their patients outside of the office.
- In addition, doctors want their patients to be more proactive in their health and medical situations.
- Interconnections between wearable sensors, mobile phones, and medical infrastructure found in WIoTs provide efficient communication between doctors and patients, enabling them to discuss micro-managing interventions, symptom feedback, and capacity to adapt to new therapies digitally.
Depending on the patient's interests, the amount of information given to them might vary:
1) an application may only provide one-line actions such as "walk briskly" or "run for 30 minutes today,"
2) an application can be made more detailed by asking the patient to do a 20-minute aerobic activity and a 10-minute anaerobic activity,
3) in addition to the information in option 2, additional reading material or online education material can be shared with the patient to inform them about clinical practice or recent research, and
4) provide a written report to the patient. On the clinician's side, the information on a specific patient may be modified to offer short and then thorough case information to assist the patient in making an intervention or treatment choice.
Clinical guidelines and a range of acceptable values may be presented to clinicians in real-time to aid them in their treatment decisions.
Healthcare Wearable IoT and Personalization of Treatment.
WIoTs have the potential to help personalize therapy.
- Each illness has its own set of symptoms, which vary in strength and spatiotemporal pattern depending on the patient.
- Physicians, for example, encounter issues when reviewing drug strategies in the treatment of chronic illnesses since their patients may react differently to given medicines.
In addition, medication adherence monitoring is another area where WIoT may assist patients.
- Future research might concentrate on health pattern recognition, in which algorithms in wearable sensors and gateways can recognize a health anomaly or an imminent emergency.
- Because the WIoT are in close proximity to the patient, this is feasible.
Administration and Maintenance of Healthcare Wearable Systems.
Efficient daily management of wearable sensors is a challenge owing to their short battery life, which need recharging on a regular basis.
- Elderly folks who experience significant health issues are expected to be the first WIoT users.
- New technologies, like as inductive quick charging, may make remembering to plug and unplug items less of a hassle.
- New techniques of intelligently sampling the sensors may also extend the life of the devices.
Standards & Requirements Of Healthcare Wearables Or WIoT.
To make the transition from consumer electronics to medical devices, WIoT must fulfill international quality requirements.
The limitations set by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) apply to mainstream medical equipment, therefore wearable sensors are classed as wellness/lifestyle monitoring gadgets to avoid the FDA's strict requirements.
The tendency is changing, and the FDA has cleared wearable sensors for use in the consumer business.
- The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has established recommendations for wireless medical devices to guarantee that they address important safety concerns connected with radio-frequency wireless systems, short and long-range communication, and secure data transfer.
- The FDA and other organizations dealing with medical device regulations are expected to define WIoT in terms of regulatory compliance and usage for medical treatments during the next several years.
- Regulatory standards will be generated from large-scale clinical studies since wearable sensors are powered technological equipment worn by people.
Security & Privacy Of Wearables.
As the internet develops, privacy and security concerns continue to arise.
Previously, only desktop PCs were vulnerable to cyber intrusions, but today mobile phones and wearable gadgets are constantly under attack by highly-skilled, coordinated hackers.
WIoT is concerned with data gathered from and delivered to people.
- Despite the fact that data is acquired via seemingly harmless wearable sensors, it is exposed to major privacy problems.
- Some wearable gadgets, for example, acquire sensitive information such as the user's exact position and movement activities, which might jeopardize the user's privacy if the information is not protected during storage or transmission.
- We need robust network security architecture for short- and long-range communication to limit the danger of cyber assaults on WIoT.
- Each tier of the WIoT, from wearable sensors to gateway devices to the cloud, should take extra efforts to protect users' privacy and security.
Thoughts On The Future Of Wearable IoTs In Healthcare.
WIoT (Wearable Internet of Things) is a new technology that has the potential to change the healthcare industry by providing an environment for automated telehealth interventions.
- We introduced a WIoT concept that outlines its architectural components, such as wearable sensors, internet-connected gateways, and cloud and big data support, for unobtrusively monitoring human health and habits.
- WIoT must not only solve the technical obstacles of creating a flexible framework for networking, compute, storage, and visualization to reach multidimensional success, but it must also strengthen its position in building clinically acceptable and operational solutions.
- WIoT, we think, will alter healthcare practices in the next ten years, allowing for low-cost therapies, early identification of diseases, efficient therapy that can be administered remotely, and patients who don't need to visit their doctors as often.
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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:
What are Healthcare Wearables and How Do They Work?
Wearables are tiny electronic devices that can detect temperature, blood pressure, blood oxygen, breathing rate, sound, GPS position, elevation, physical movement, changes in direction, and the electrical activity of the heart, muscles, brain, and skin when they are worn on the body.
What are three of the most common wearable devices?
Wearable technology includes your Apple Watch and Fitbit, but they aren't the only products being produced today. Smart watches, VR and AR technologies, smart jackets, and a slew of other products are all pointing us in the direction of a more connected existence.
What are some examples of healthcare technology that can be worn?
Skin temperature, sweat sensors, heart rate monitors, glucose monitors, holter monitors, and other wearables for early illness diagnoses are examples. How medical wearable software works: For analysis, the cloud server receives patient health data from devices that continuously monitor the patient's vitals.
What role will wearable medical gadgets play in the future of healthcare?
To increase the accuracy of clinical evaluation, wearable sensors for remote healthcare monitoring systems are being created. Electrocardiograph (EKG) sensors in wearables can monitor a patient's heart activity by detecting several physiological signals.
What role do wearable gadgets play in healthcare?
Patient monitoring, surveillance, screening, diagnosis, and therapy, post-treatment, and continuous management may all be done using wearable devices. These gadgets also use real-time physiological input to verify and validate therapy efficacy.
What do smart wearables entail?
Smart electronic devices (electronic devices with microcontrollers) that are worn close to and/or on the surface of the skin, where they detect, analyze, and transmit information, are known as wearable technology, wearables, fashion technology, smartwear, tech togs, streetwear tech, skin electronics, or fashion electronics.
What is the role of IoT in healthcare?
Hospitals and the Internet of Things Apart from monitoring patients' health, hospitals may benefit from IoT devices in a variety of ways. Medical equipment such as wheelchairs, defibrillators, nebulizers, oxygen pumps, and other monitoring equipment are tracked in real time using IoT devices with sensors.
What are smart medical gadgets, and how do they work?
A smart medical gadget, which is equipped with wireless IoT technology and can monitor and send important data in real time, connects physicians with patients at home or on the way to the hospital. These gadgets provide patients a lot of freedom while also allowing healthcare practitioners to keep an eye on them from afar.
Do wearables have a positive impact on one's health?
Wearable technologies have shown to be beneficial in assisting patients and clinicians in developing treatment plans and tracking results. Wearable gadgets may also aid with chronic disease self-management by delivering real-time data.
Is wearable technology a component of orthopedic health care's future?
Wearable technology in orthopedics might help to expedite patient-physician communication, which could help to alleviate the burden of growing health-care expenses and exhaustion caused by electronic health data.
What is the significance of wearable technology?
Wearable technology allows us to measure our fitness levels, see text messages more quickly, and track our whereabouts using GPS. Best of all, most of the gadgets that enable us to do so are hands-free and portable, so we don't have to take them out of our pockets.
What is the present state of wearable technology?
According to a HIMSS poll, more than half of healthcare practitioners regarded wearable technology to be beneficial in monitoring their patients. They use commercial and personal-grade wearables to manage prescriptions, check health conditions and vitals, follow post-operative patients' recovery, and track sleep.
What exactly qualifies as wearable technology?
Wearable technology, often known as "wearables," is a class of electronic devices that may be worn as jewelry, embedded in clothes, implanted in the user's body, or even tattooed on the skin.
What IoT devices are utilized in the healthcare industry?
Devices for medical monitoring Patient monitoring using the internet. The most popular use of IoT devices in healthcare is remote patient monitoring. Glucose monitoring is a procedure that involves measuring the amount of glucose in the blood. Monitoring of the heart rate. Hand hygiene is being monitored. Monitoring depression and mood. Parkinson's disease is being monitored. Inhalers that are linked. Sensors that can be ingested.
What are linked medical devices, and how do they work?
"Connected medical devices" are devices that can send and receive data to and from another device or the internet (for example, a heartrate monitor that sends patient heartrate data to a physician's tablet through Bluetooth).
What role does wearable technology have in the practice of medicine?
Wearable gadgets may offer reliable vitals readings, allowing clinicians to provide better treatment. Mental health monitoring is a relatively recent use for wearable technology. Wearables may monitor vital signs like heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature, giving doctors insight into a patient's mental health.
References and Further Reading:
- Asada HH, Shaltis P, Reisner A, Rhee S, Hutchinson RC: Mobile monitoring with wearable photoplethysmographic biosensors. IEEE Eng Med Biol Mag (2003), 22:28-40.
- Batch, Bryan C., et al. "Weight loss intervention for young adults using mobile technology: Design and rationale of a randomized controlled trial—Cell Phone Intervention for You (CITY)." Contemporary clinical trials 37.2 (2014): 333-341.
- G. Yang, et al. "A Health-IoT Platform Based on the Integration of Intelligent Packaging, Unobtrusive Bio-Sensor and Intelligent Medicine Box," IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (TII), doi: 10.1109/TII.2014.2307795, 2014.
- Gubbi, Jayavardhana, et al. "Internet of Things (IoT): A vision, architectural elements, and future directions." Future Generation Computer Systems 29.7 (2013): 1645-1660.
- F. Seoane, et al. “Sensorized Garments and Textrode-Enabled Measurement Instrumentation for Ambulatory Assessment of the Autonomic Nervous System Response in the ATREC Project” vol.13, no.7, pp. 8997-9015, Jul. 2013.
- Fernando, Niroshinie, Seng W. Loke, and Wenny Rahayu. "Mobile cloud computing: A survey." Future Generation Computer Systems 29.1 (2013): 84-106.
- Fortino, Giancarlo, et al. "Bodycloud: a saas approach for community body sensor networks." Future Generation Computer Systems 35 (2014): 62-79.
- Market Study Report, “Wearable Computing Devices, Like Apple’s iWatch, Will Exceed 485 Million Annual Shipments by 2018”, ABI Research. Feb. 21, 2013.
- Mankodiya, K., et al. "Wearable ECG module for long-term recordings using a smartphone processor." Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Ubiquitous Health and Wellness, Denmark. 2010.
- Press Release, “FDA Clears NeuroMetrix Wearable Technology for Over-the-Counter Use in Treatment of Chronic Pain”. Jul 18, 2014.
- Sharma, Vinod, et al. "SPARK: Personalized Parkinson Disease Interventions through Synergy between a Smartphone and a Smartwatch." Design, User Experience, and Usability. Springer International Publishing, 2014. 103-114.
- Terry G. Mahn, “Wireless Medical Technologies: Navigating Goverment Regulation in New Medical Age”. A report on medical device regulation. Released on Nov. 2013.
- Zhang, Q., Ren, L., & Shi, W. HONEY: a multimodality fall detection and telecare system. Telemedicine and e-Health, (2013): 19(5), 415-429.