The wearable technology in healthcare is going beyond the fitness tracker we are used to. One of the hottest markets for wearable technology and the Internet of Things (IoT) is healthcare. The prediction from the beginning of 2020 shows that the revenue of wearable health technology will reach 67.2 billion dollars by 2030. Today healthcare technology is more powerful than early medical wearables (such as heart rate and activity trackers), including medical devices for diagnosing and treating diseases, and reducing the frequencies patients with chronic diseases need to see a doctor in person. Currently, medical wearables have developed from pure mechanical devices to real intelligent and active systems, which can predict and help diagnose a variety of diseases and promote recovery. These RPM devices represent a new frontier which can provide insightful data and continuous patient data collection, and monitor through personalized indicators, so as to achieve higher efficiency.
Convenience without office visits: Wearable technology in healthcare keeps tracking our vital signs and biological characteristics and sending these information to our healthcare providers, thus reducing the frequencies of visits per year and making the whole process of visits easier and more personalized. In the whole patient care ecosystem, health data can be easily shared between remote patients and clinicians. Wearable health trackers allow democratization and decentralization of patient information, because they create a new data flow that is not controlled by medical care providers, which is provided by external providers that users can freely manage and access. Another important benefit is that wireless devices equipped with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi can now easily transfer information to handheld mobile devices, eliminating the burden of data synchronization.
Patients cost can be significantly reduced: Forbes reported that the wearable technology in healthcare may reduce the hospital cost by as much as 16% in the next five years. This cost saving is attributed to the prediction ability provided by these devices, which is combined with other technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), can predict a variety of hidden diseases before their clinical manifestations. The latter not only allows patients to seek cheaper and more effective treatment, but also allows hospitals to better use their resources.
Employees' workload can be reduced: By implementing the wearable technology, face-to-face consultation will also be reduced, thus alleviating the workload of employees, which, in turn, will benefit hospitals with more motivated and energetic employees.
