Smart Healthcare Use Cases and Applications

Abstract

The growth of IoT is tremendous and is making its presence into nearly every space from industries to health care. The healthcare industry is now getting embraced by technological innovations. IoT is making the promise of smart and connected care a reality. Leading technologies such as Big Data, IoT, advanced analytics, and many other technological modernizations have turned the old-style health care into smart health care. Smart health care can be defined as using mobile and electronic technology for efficient diagnosis of the disease, better-quality treatment of the patients, and improved quality of lives. The healthcare industry is rapidly adopting Internet of things technologies in everything from wearable’s to patient monitoring, in order to improve precision, endorse efficiency, cut costs, and boost health and augment safety. The newest research conducted by industry experts shows how the market for smart healthcare solutions is growing at a tremendous pace. IoT is an enabler to drive better asset utilization; new revenues achieve improved care for patients and reduced costs. In addition, it has the potential to revolutionize how health care is delivered. The new features offered by distributed analytics and edge intelligence, if successfully applied for time-sensitive healthcare applications, have great potential to accelerate the discovery of early notification of emergency situations to support smart decision-making. Smart health care, which monitors users’ living settings and health status using wearable sensing devices and collecting their data over a network under daily life, is expected as a new trend. It is getting more attention along with the increase of demands of preventive care. This chapter gives an overview on the range of applications for the Internet of Things, share examples that illustrate how IoT products and services are being deployed around the globe, by heathcare industry in some areas like image management, visualization, remote health and monitoring, healthcare asset tracking, health monitoring using wearable devices, enhanced drug management, and patient flow analysis. IoT customer case studies help to demonstrate the breadth of possibilities for IoT applications in health care.