Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has done wonders in healthcare industry, transforming the way information is collected and processed. Internet of Things (IoT) goes one step further by combining ICT with intelligence to capture real-time data from medical devices and apply the insights in vital areas to streamline the process and enable faster and effective decision making.
However, IoT will excel in healthcare only if it supports the industry’s core philosophy, “Prevention is better than cure.” “Why can’t technology be utilized to promote healthy lifestyle and habits to prevent life-threatening diseases?” It’s this line of thought that prompted Harman to think beyond the traditional healthcare IoT and leverage its core capabilities to develop technologies that can help prevent diseases.
In response to the preventive healthcare needs, HARMAN Connected Services developed an IoT solution designed to prevent Hospital Acquired Infection (HAI). The fact that HAI causes over 99,000 deaths each year and accounts for $3-4 billion in healthcare costs explains the severity of the situation. HARMAN’s IoT device uses Real-time Location System (RTLS) to capture individual staff interactions with a hand-sanitizer, and then analyze the data for compliance checking so that appropriate preventive measures can be adopted.
Cool; isn’t it? All this while, we could never imagine that such simple steps can save several thousands of lives. This is just the beginning. Thanks to IoT, right from patient monitoring to remote assessment, drug management to insurance tracking, hospital management to research, the Connected Healthcare technology can revolutionize the healthcare industry in a big way.
The impact of IoT in Healthcare is far-reaching. Savings gained from reduction in patient visits, accurate service delivery, improvement in treatment outcomes, disease prevention strategies, etc., are beyond the scope of our calculations. This explains why governments across the world view IoT as an essential pillar of digital economy. The IoTUK program is one such effort that focuses on increasing the adoption of IoT across the public sector to make the country healthy and wealthy.
Cost benefits apart, Connected Health emerges as the answer to some of the baffling questions the industry has been facing for long. IoT is set to revolutionize medical research by facilitating the flow of real-time intelligence across life-critical data and analyzing them to gain insights on various problems confronted by medical professionals. With IoT, researchers now enjoy the power of high performance computing (HPC) for testing and validation of key research data with highest levels of accuracy.
One of the finest innovations from HARMAN in the field of healthcare research is a comprehensive Protein Research and Analytics Tool that empowers research personnel with standardized, quantitative and reproducible analysis of protein composition while also reducing the workflow significantly.
HARMAN’s IoT solutions are built on Microsoft Azure, the cloud-based IoT offering from Microsoft. The excellence of the partnership between HARMAN and Microsoft has resulted in HARMAN winning the 2015 Microsoft Partner of the Year Award for Intelligent Systems & Services (IoT) category.
The IoT boom has just begun, and the growth has been astonishing. With IoT in healthcare set to grow at CAGR of 37.6% over the next five years, the industry will witness more innovations in this line.
To know more about how HARMAN transforms the healthcare through its CONNECTED ecosystem/ IoT ecosystem and Big Data Analytics, please click here.
