WEARABLES - INSIDABLES - IOT - CONNECTED DEVICES - QUANTIFIEDSELF

Wearables that have weaved their way into everyday life include smart watches and wireless earphones, while in the healthcare setting, common devices include wearable injectors, electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring patches, listening aids, and more.

A major pain point facing the use of these wearables is the issue of keeping these devices properly and conveniently powered. As the number of wearables one uses increases, the need to charge multiple batteries rises in tandem, consuming huge amounts of electricity.

A research team, led by Associate Professor Jerald Yoo from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the N.1 Institute for Health at the National University of Singapore (NUS), has developed a technology that enables a single device, such as a mobile phone placed in the pocket, to wirelessly power other wearable devices on a user's body, using the human body as a medium for power transmission.

The team's novel system has an added advantage—it can harvest unused energy from electronics in a typical home or office environment to power the wearables.

The NUS team designed a receiver and transmitter system that uses the human body as a medium for power transmission and energy harvesting. Each receiver and transmitter contains a chip that is used as a springboard to extend coverage over the entire body.

A user just needs to place the transmitter on a single power source, such as the smart watch on a user's wrist, while multiple receivers can be placed anywhere on the person's body. The system then harnesses energy from the source to power multiple wearables on the user's body via a process termed as body-coupled power transmission. In this way, the user will only need to charge one device, and the rest of the gadgets that are worn can simultaneously be powered up from that single source. The team's experiments showed that their system allows a single power source that is fully charged to power up to 10 wearable devices on the body, for a duration of over 10 hours.

As a complementary source of power, the NUS team also looked into harvesting energy from the environment. Their research found that typical office and home environments have parasitic electromagnetic (EM) waves that people are exposed to all the time, for instance, from a running laptop. The team's novel receiver scavenges the EM waves from the ambient environment, and through a process referred to as body-coupled powering, the human body is able to harvest this energy to power the wearable devices, regardless of their locations around the body.

This paves the way for smaller, battery-free wearables

read the paper in Nature at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41928-021-00592-y

read the original unedited article https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-approach-wirelessly-power-wearable-devices.html

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of physical objects that can share electronic information when gathered together. They include sensors that have the ability to track information about the human body or industrial machines that transmit the production process data to the nearby sensors.

The IoT is all over and is used in smart homes and even retail. It also plays a crucial role in healthcare.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing healthcare in different ways, including improving the care patients get, better results from treatments, and reducing the costs of treatments for patients. Patients get to connect better with the healthcare providers, and their performance is also enhanced.

The main benefits it has brought about to the healthcare industry include:

• Real-time monitoring of patients remotely, which reduces the costs incurred during readmissions and doctor visits.
• Errors are much less likely to occur with IoT devices. The data plays an essential role in ensuring effective decision-making, and all the operations in the healthcare industry are functioning smoothly. This helps reduce the overall number of errors.
• The quality of treatment received is excellent since physicians make decisions from evidence-based information. Hence there’s complete transparency.
• Equipment and drugs are better managed. It has always been a significant challenge to manage drugs and equipment in healthcare. However, with devices being connected, the drugs and equipment are utilized and managed efficiently, which helps with cost reduction.
• Diagnosis is much faster and more accurate. A patient can be diagnosed more efficiently due to consistent remote monitoring. Real-time data is collected, and it helps with the diagnosis of a vast number of different diseases. They are diagnosed at an early stage before they worsen or even before the disease develops fully.

IoT devices are revolutionizing how healthcare is delivered and monitored. We guess that we still have only seen the tip of the iceberg. In the years to come, the question will not be if we are connected but how we will be connected and protect our privacy: digital tattoos, smartwatches, smart lenses, or smart pills being just some of the possibilities.

The Internet of Things and the multitude of connected devices it offers is on a path to disrupt how healthcare is carried out.

Discover how by reading the original article at https://digitalhealthcentral.com/2021/05/07/the-benefits-of-internet-of-things-in-healthcare/