Internet of Things: Opportunities for the pharma and health care industries
“More objects are becoming embedded with sensors and gaining the ability to communicate. The resulting information networks promise to create new business models, improve business processes, and reduce costs and risks” Mckinsey – Internet of Things (2010)
The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the networking of physical objects through the use of embedded sensors, actuators, and other devices that can collect or transmit information about the objects. Advances in wireless networking technology have made it possible to collect data from these sensors almost anywhere at any time. The information collected from these smart devices can then be analysed to optimise products, services, and operations.
In recent years, we see an increasing use of IoT in the pharmaceutical and health care industries. Pill-shaped microcameras – “chip in a pill”, a special ingestible pill – have been developed to traverse the human digestive tract, capturing the health status, as well as drug effects on key organs, and transmit the data to a wearable device. This data is then sent as a report over cloud to health care personnel (HCP) for diagnosis. The information obtained can enable HCPs to prescribe personalised medicines that will improve drug efficacy considerably and reduce treatment period.
The Internet of Things is also applied in helping people keep track of their medications at home through smart devices used as personal medication assistant.
