WEARABLES - INSIDABLES - IOT - CONNECTED DEVICES - QUANTIFIEDSELF

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/

Cybersecurity attacks on Healthcare and Public Health (HPH) critical infrastructure, such as healthcare delivery organizations (HDOs), are occurring with greater frequency.  Disruptions in clinical care operations can put patients at risk.

Securing critical infrastucture is a shared responsibility across many stakeholders, and with respect to medical
devices the primary stakeholders are FDA, Medical Device Manufacturers (MDMs), and HDOs.

A common preparedness and response challenge FDA heard from its stakeholders in the aftermath of the aforementioned attacks is that

• HDOs did not know with whom to communicate (e.g. MDM-HDO interactions);
• what actions they might consider taking;
• and what resources were available to aid in their response.

Without timely, accurate information and incorporation of medical device cybersecurity into their organizational emergency response plans, it was difficult for HDOs to assess and mitigate the impact of these attacks on their medical devices.

To address this unmet need, the MITRE team (with the support of FDA), engaged with a broad distribution of stakeholder groups to understand the gaps, challenges, and resources for HDOs participating in medical device cybersecurity preparedness and response activities.

Their efforts resulted in the creation of this playbook that may serve as a resource for HDOs.

The playbook provides a stakeholder-derived, open source, and customizable framework that HDOs may choose to leverage as a part of their emergency response plans in order to ultimately limit disruptions in continuity of clinical care as well as the potential for direct patient harm stemming from medical device cyber security incidents.

The link to the PDF of the first version of the playbook -> https://www.mitre.org/sites/default/files/publications/pr-18-1550-Medical-Device-Cybersecurity-Playbook.pdf

It is projected that by next year, over 7.6 billion people throughout the world will use over 30 billion smart, sensor-based wearable devices that will monitor human activities, including mental-health data.

Smartphones and wearable sensors are able to detect and analyze behaviors such as activity (by GPS, location, and speed); sleep hours (your total time in bed or asleep); and various brain functions through games prompted to test memory, executive capacities, emotions and moods.

This will soon become the paramount source of obtaining health data with a special emphasis on mental health issues.

Psychiatrists will be able to use these new technologies to identify a healthy person at risk by being able to analyze samplings of feelings, thoughts, and general behaviors as they occur in real time and in their real life.

Well, there are reliability issues, problem of missing data, retention/adherence abilities, and subjects neglecting to wear or charge their devices after a certain period of time.

The new learning algorithms of artificial intelligence technologies are able to integrate structured and unstructured data and should eventually be able to tackle these potential pitfalls.

Read the original article at https://www.miamiherald.com/living/health-fitness/article219558560.html

Although the Internet of Things in healthcare is not yet in widespread use throughout the industry, Indranil "Neal" Ganguly predicts that, in the next five years, there will be a massive increase in IoT for healthcare, "both on the clinical side as well as on the back end.

Ganguly explained how hospitals are using, or could use, IoT for healthcare in three areas:

Hospitals are not using IoT to track inventory in as widespread a manner as would be desirable, Ganguly said. He added that healthcare could learn a few lessons from retail.

Although the concept of RFID has been out there for 5 to 10 years, Ganguly said adoption of this technology hasn't taken hold as rapidly as he would like

Ganguly said that when it comes to IoT for medical device integration, the focus is more on the consumer end.

"People are looking at how to integrate things like the Fitbits and other fitness devices to bring patient provided data into the cycle of care delivery," Ganguly said.

more at : http://internetofthingsagenda.techtarget.com/feature/IoT-for-healthcare-Three-use-cases

Wearables, devices used to sense data and process it into information, are generating quite the buzz in healthcare these days. But down the line, does that buzz come with a sting?

A newly published Apple patent application that details ways to improve a wrist-based pedometer could represent another piece of evidence pointing to an iWatch.

The application, “Wrist Pedometer Step Detection,” came out of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today. This is part of the standard patent process toward issuance. It details ways to improve step detection when someone is wearing a pedometer on a wrist.

In the patent application’s implementation, the pedometer might be able to “automatically determine that the pedometer is being worn on a user’s wrist.”

Pedometers, the application points out, are often attached to a user’s trunk – on the waist or pants or shirt pocket. A commonly used algorithm to measures steps, however, doesn’t work as well when the pedometer is on a wrist, because the arm’s movement can interfere with the measurement of acceleration.

No matter how innovative the personal health records (PHRs) or electronic health records (EHRs) become, given the highly fragmented and specialized US healthcare system they still need to exchange data in a secure way that preserves privacy and trust. That is the goal of health information exchange (HIE).

The key HIE technical challenges are easily understood. Parts of a patient's clinical data will often be stored in many EHRs. For a patient with four, five, or more chronic diseases (these drive half of all Medicare costs) research shows that this will typically exceed 10 EHR implementations from multiple vendors! A conscientious provider seeing such a patient would want a comprehensive view of all of this care in order to save time collecting information that already exists, avoid duplicating tests and procedures that have already been done, and prevent mistakes from lack of information.

More recently there is Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), which is essentially based on the idea that healthcare information can be exchanged the same way that other information is shared on the Internet. If you've used Amazon to look for goods to purchase, you might have noticed that, up there in the URL, text appears when you click the search button that specifies what you want. Although it might be a bit cryptic, even a non-technical person can usually figure out most of what it says.

What's really going on here? You're at your computer (which, of course, these days might be a mobile device such as a smartphone), and the information you want is securely stored in, for example, Amazon's cloud. You specify what you want, and your browser creates a query and sends it to the cloud, where it might be routed to any one of thousands of Amazon servers that will interpret it, query a database, and return the information you requested. This ability to route requests to any server in the cloud that is available is another key technical property that lowers costs and is exploited in FHIR.

As with Direct, there is more to the story than I've described (technically inclined readers should read the FHIR Summary, which is also available as a two-page PDF). But this should suffice to give you the basic idea of what is increasingly termed "API-based HIE."

more at http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/electronic-health-records/free-the-data-apis-boost-health-information-exchange/d/d-id/1113579

No one has arms long enough to wear all of the activity-tracking wristbands currently on sale or awaiting release. These devices count your steps, measure your sleep and some even monitor your heart rate.

But do you know how this information immediately applies to your lifestyle, or what you should do with it?

The services behind these trackers need to invest in immediacy by providing useful information, ideally in real time, so we can optimize our wealth of data into action.

Everyone wants to be better, but nobody has a baseline for understanding themselves.

what use is the data without knowing in real time what you, individually, can do to change it?

I’d like to know whether I need to slow down. Am I pushing myself too hard?

The e-Health Sensor Shield V2.0 allows Arduino and Raspberry Pi users to perform biometric and medical applications where body monitoring is needed by using 10 different sensors: pulse, oxygen in blood (SPO2), airflow (breathing), body temperature, electrocardiogram (ECG), glucometer, galvanic skin response (GSR - sweating), blood pressure (sphygmomanometer), patient position (accelerometer) and muscle/eletromyography sensor (EMG).

This information can be used to monitor in real time the state of a patient or to get sensitive data in order to be subsequently analysed for medical diagnosis. Biometric information gathered can be wirelessly sent using any of the 6 connectivity options available: Wi-Fi, 3G, GPRS, Bluetooth, 802.15.4 and ZigBee depending on the application.

If real time image diagnosis is needed a camera can be attached to the 3G module in order to send photos and videos of the patient to a medical diagnosis center.

Data can be sent to the Cloud in order to perform permanent storage or visualized in real time by sending the data directly to a laptop or Smartphone. iPhone and Android applications have been designed in order to easily see the patient's information.

Learn how doctors will be able to develop targeted cancer therapy based on you and your cancer’s genetics.

How to personalize cancer treatment

Once a doctor sequences your full genome as well as your cancer’s DNA, mapping that information to the right treatment is difficult. Today, these types of DNA-based plans, where available, can take weeks or even months. Cognitive systems will decrease these times, while increasing the availability by providing doctors with information they can use to quickly build a focused treatment plan in just days or even minutes – all via the cloud.

Within five years, deep insights based on DNA sequencing will be accessible to more doctors and patients to help tackle cancer. By using cognitive systems that continuously learn about cancer and the patients who have cancer, the level of care will only improve. No more assumptions about cancer location or type, or any disease with a DNA link, like heart disease and stroke.

more at http://www.research.ibm.com/cognitive-computing/machine-learning-applications/targeted-cancer-therapy.shtml#fbid=2VHk6CaxW6l

directly view the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0M1DMdc1mQ0

The concepts of “self-tracking” and “the quantified self” have recently begun to emerge in discussions of how best to optimize one’s life. These concepts refer to the practice of gathering data about oneself on a regular basis and then recording and analyzing the data to produce statistics and other data (such as images) relating to one’s bodily functions and everyday habits. Some self-trackers collect data on only one or two dimensions of their lives, and only for a short time. Others may do so for hundreds of phenomena and for long periods.

The tracking and analysis of aspects of one’s self and one’s body are not new practices. People have been recording their habits and health-related metrics for centuries as part of attempts at self-reflection and self-improvement.

What is indisputably new is the term “the quantified self” and its associated movement, which includes a dedicated website with that title, and regular meetings and conferences, as well as the novel ways of self-tracking using digital technologies that have developed in recent years.

A growing range of digital devices with associated apps are now available for self-tracking [1]. Many of these devices can be worn on or close to the body to measure elements of the user’s everyday life and activities and produce data that can be recorded and monitored by the user. They include not only digital cameras, smartphones, tablet computers, watches, wireless weight scales, and blood pressure monitors, but also wearable bands or patches, clip-on devices and jewelry with embedded sensors able to measure bodily functions or movement and upload data wirelessly.

In many of these devices global positioning devices, gyroscopes, altimeters, and accelerometers provide spatial location and quantify movement. These technologies allow self-trackers to collect data on their moods, diet, dreams, social encounters, posture, sexual activity, blood chemistry, heart rate, body temperature, exercise patterns, brain function, alcohol, coffee and tobacco consumption, and many other variables.

Read more at the original source: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?reload=true&tp=&arnumber=6679313