How IoT Can Significanlty Improve Healthcare in the Context of Smart City
their healthcare infrastructure with respect to evolving citizens’ needs 9.
According to a Veterans administrative study published by Marlis Meyer et al, by leveraging remote health monitoring solutions, there is a potential to reduce hospital admissions by 63 %. This will significantly save on the infrastructure bandwidth( number of hospital beds, medical equipment, administrative overheads and documentation), which could be utilized for treatment-seeking patients, thereby enhancing a city’ s ranking on this criteria 10.
2. Medical Equipment Predictive
Maintenance and Enhancing Utilization Improving the uptime of medical equipment( diagnostic machines such as X-ray, MRI, Ultrasound; Anesthetic machines, incubators, etc.) in hospitals, can help improve utilization rates along with enhancing patient care, safety and experience. In-person manual maintenance visits at regular intervals incur high maintenance costs. Furthermore, certain medical equipment components are too expensive and are available only as subassemblies( not individual parts), making uniform wear and tear an ongoing objective. Also, the Food and Drug Administration( FDA) mandates reporting of all medical equipment failures, but due to non-digitized means of failure capture and repair, very low adherence rates were found by FDAsponsored surveys 11.
Operational efficiencies and adherence to compliance requirements will be significantly enhanced by IoT-enabled sensing technologies. These technologies enable remote monitoring of medical equipment parameters / usage patterns and generates alerts on performance-sensitive issues.
For example, sensors embedded on existing medical equipment capture real time physical state data such as vibration / coolant levels, diagnostics machine lamp temperature thresholds, change in physical orientation, detection of nitrous oxide in anesthetic machines, thread cut depth, etc. These data sets are sent periodically( as per the business / operational requirement) over short-range radio( wireless) protocol to the gateway. Gateways filter data based on predefined rules and conditions( i. e., sending only the average vibration levels and not each reading). This filtered data is then sent to the cloud-based IoT platform, saving network bandwidth considerably. The IoT platform provides the capability to integrate this sensor data along with Enterprise Resource Planning data( number of examinations done, mean time between examination, etc.) – to generate operational insights and alerts. Predictive analytical models( failure prediction, pattern finding, etc.) – will help ascertain whether standard operating procedures were followed during the equipment usage, further enhancing equipment life cycle, utilization and reducing depreciation rates.
9 https:// icity. smu. edu. sg / sites / icity. smu. edu. sg / files / publications / WP _ Technologies % 20for % 20Ageing-in- Place % 20May % 202016 % 20Webpress. pdf 10 http:// www. asklepios. de / upload / RSLT _ A _ 0495 _ Clinical _ Application _ Note _ Chronic _ Disease _ Overview _ 1606. pdf
11 https:// www. hindawi. com / journals / jhe / 2016 / 7267983 /
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