The total installed base of Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices is estimated to grow to 75.44 billion worldwide by 2025, a 5x increase in 10 years. The IoT is the next major step in delivering the Internet’s promise of making the world a connected place. In healthcare, the connected and wearable devices are helping healthcare providers provide improved patient care services at lower costs. 87% of healthcare organizations will be using IoT technology in their facilities by 2019.

Business Problem

Today, wearable medical devices enabled by IoT are playing a significant role in the healthcare industry by offering information that is essential for the patients to have control of their health outcomes. Our premium healthcare client had a requirement to build an IoT and AI-based cloud system to help with improved patient compliance, detecting device failures before they become serious adverse events. In addition, the requirement was to collect data that can lead to better-personalized therapy or treatment.

In addition, the client wanted to gain more access to patients’ information for an in-depth understanding of their behaviors and improving care.

Solution

We helped make this happen by enabling centralized data collection. Then using machine learning techniques, we combed through the data. This helped identifying new patterns, because data is collected centrally, engineers and researchers can improve diagnostic algorithms over time. There were two key aspects of the solution:

1. Prediction model: Deep learning to help detect the probable critical device failure. The data was collected from all the connected devices centrally and then deep learning to model the prediction so that it can trace the effectiveness of a particular device and treatment. They can also help with device traceability and provide ease for software updates when a critical problem is detected in the field.
2. Security: The solution had big consideration around security since a lot of patient-specific data was collected and centrally located. We designed the solution using the right cloud architecture and compliance models.

Business Benefits

The solution that we developed, offered individuals with the data they require to gain much better control over their health outcomes.  We delivered business benefits such as:

• The stakeholders got greater visibility into the status of patient health thus allowing them to make informed decisions.
• The internal team could monitor different wellness, health and fitness factors for tracking progress towards their patient health goals.
• With the help of the wearable devices, patients could share their data with their healthcare providers so that the physicians now have a more detailed understanding of their conditions.
• Wearable devices collected a massive amount of relevant data which helped the healthcare practitioners determine correlations between medical conditions and handle them effectively.
• These devices enabled doctors to track the daily calorie intake and physical activity of patients.
• Connected devices provided diagnostic benefits, automated alerts, remote monitoring, improved patient outcomes, and has the potential of lowering the overall healthcare costs.
• Remote monitoring of chronic diseases
• Decrease cost while patient care service overall improved
• Help facilitate better long-term management of diseases