The healthcare industry is continuing to embrace new technologies that optimize operations to support our valued medical professionals, in addition to technologies that improve patient outcomes and help save lives. According to market forecasts, the global demand for the Internet of Things (IoT) in the healthcare market will reach $534.3 billion by 2025. This projected growth highlights the pivotal role IoT devices will continue to play as they are used for a wide variety of applications, such as patient monitoring, operations management and beyond.
While IoT devices have a lot of potential for the healthcare industry, there are some downsides that have limited their feasibility for adoption at scale. Many of these connected solutions are battery-powered, requiring maintenance time to change the batteries on a regular basis. The time commitment to change all these batteries adds one more piece of stress to hardworking hospital employees, and the costs of buying new batteries – not to mention the labor costs – also adds up fast. For IoT devices to be more widely adopted across the healthcare industry, the maintenance of these devices needs to be minimal and the materials costs need to be reasonable as well. Many hospitals are also taking a closer look at sustainability practices, so the environmental concern of battery waste is also growing.
Over the past few years, a few cutting-edge technologies have emerged to solve the issues associated with batteries in IoT devices, ushering in new possibilities for the IoT in healthcare. Lowest power radio, on-demand wake-up and multisource controlled energy harvesting are a few key technologies that help significantly extend the battery life of wireless devices. Lowest power radio technology is designed to enable connected devices to operate with minimal power, maximizing battery life. On-demand wake-up technology allows devices to listen for incoming transmissions (such as sounds) while remaining in a very low power state. And controlled energy harvesting technology enables devices, such as battery-free beacons, to draw energy from movement, heat, the light in the room, or even radio frequency (RF) from other devices. When used with the latest Bluetooth standard, Bluetooth 5.0, these technologies can power forever battery life – where batteries do not need to be changed during the lifetime of a device – or these technologies can even replace the need for batteries in a device. Let’s explore a few healthcare applications that would benefit from these types of devices.
Exposure notification systems are being rolled out around the world to help stop the spread of COVID-19. These systems use Bluetooth to exchange anonymous identifiers with other smartphones that are less than six feet away. While smartphones are useful for the general public to take stay informed about their potential exposure to the virus, medical facilities will need purpose-built devices for their own exposure notification systems. These devices will likely be small wearables such as wrist bands or beacons that are easy to use, comfortable for all-day wear and cost-efficient to roll out.
Using custom exposure notification systems, medical facilities can set specific parameters based on the needs of their environment – for example, hospitals might want wearables to log a contact event when patients or employees come within 12 feet of each other, which is double the distance of current exposure notification systems.
