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of cleanliness and, if any staff fails to maintain the threshold value, will be alerted about sanitizing their hands. Even the sensors can track the time of sanitization done and alert them to sanitize their hands.
Since real-time monitoring of the hand hygiene is possible by the IoT connected devices, everyone will be more aware and alerted about the cleanliness and importance of the hygiene hands which leads to a healthy environment and helps to control the spread of viruses.
1.7.15 Efficient Drug Management
Using IoT-enabled devices management of drugs can be done in an efficient manner starting from the production to the supply chain management.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are used for distribution purpose which also records a real-time record of the availability of the drugs and whether distribution is correctly done. The temperature during production process is also monitored to detect any variations.
With the proper supply chain management, production cost can be reduced and patients will get good quality drugs at a reduced rate.
1.7.16 Smart Sole
Alzheimer is a dreaded disease for elderly people and their loved ones as handling such patients is a difficult task. The patients tend to forget their daily activities and many of them loss their way back home and it creates difficulty in locating them.
IoT-enabled devices with smart GPS sole embedded system will provide a solution for this problem. It tracks the patient’s location and updates it into the connected devices. It is a waterproof system so even if the patient enters water bodies, it will be working and sending signals to the connected devices. It will alert the loved ones about the location of the patients if they are wandering anywhere. This device is easy to wear as it is embedded into the sole and patients will never forget to wear footwear while going out.
Such smart devices will help Alzheimer patients to lead a healthy and normal life.
1.7.17 Body Scanning
To lead a healthy life, regular body checkups are required but most of the time people ignore the checkups on regular basis. To overcome this, a smart body scanner which scans the body and updates about the variations in body parameters can be used.
The scanner is basically a full-length mirror with a 3D camera and a weigh scale which scans the entire body and stores the images and the data will be used for processing the results in a mobile application. This application will create a graphical chart about the variations in body dimensions and parameters which will be helpful in maintaining fitness.
1.7.18 Medical Waste Management
Hospital waste management is a difficult problem faced by the healthcare facilities throughout the world. If these bio medical wastes are not disposed properly, it may lead to spread of infectious diseases. IoT-enabled waste management system will provide a smart solution to this problem.
Sensor-enabled dustbins may be used which is connected through IoT devices. The sensors detect the amount of trash present and automated messages will be generated to dispose the waste when the garbage bin is full. Through the connected devices, autonomous robots can fetch the garbage and dispose it in a smart way.
As robots are involved in disposing medical wastes, this may reduce the risk of spreading of the diseases through housekeeping staff who generally deals with disposal of garbage. This smart way of waste disposal will keep the hospital environment clean and safe.
1.7.19 Monitoring the Heart Rate
There is an increase in the number of heart patients throughout the world due to the unhealthy lifestyle. Most of the time delay in getting medical attention results in the loss of life of the patients.
With the advancement in technology, regular monitoring of the heartbeat and pulse rate is possible by means of sensor-enabled IoT devices. Since it is a real-time monitoring, any variations in the heart rate or pulse rate will be alerted to the patients as well as doctors through connected devices. Immediate medical attention is possible which can save many lives.
1.7.20 Robot Nurse
Workload of the nurses in hospitals are more which makes them exhausted and less efficient. Artificial Intelligence–enabled robots can assist the nurses in their day-to-day activities. The robots may be connected to IoT devices so that the activity of the robots can be scheduled and monitored by the nurses.
Robots can assist the nurses in picking and placing the medicines and alerting the patients to take medicines on time. They can give personal care for the patients and also can clean the rooms and beds. Nurses can assign the tasks to robots and monitor it. These robots may be controlled by the patients and nurses by means of mobile devices.
With these assistant robots, nurses can manage their workload in an efficient manner and provide better service to the patients.
These are some of the IoT applications in healthcare system which can give a new dimension to the patient treatment and healthcare services.
1.8 Global Smart Healthcare Market
It has been found that the four factors which demand the growth of smart healthcare operations are the following:
Remote health monitoring for aged people
Awareness about the importance of health and staying fit
Increased use of wearable smart gadgets for monitoring health
New business models based on smart healthcare systems
The global market growth is as shown in Figure 1.2. It has been estimated that the remote health monitoring will increase the global healthcare market by 24.55% by 2020. Increase in the use of ingestible smart pills will drive the market to 6.93 billion dollars by 2020 with a market growth of 23.62%. It has been estimated that the total market value of smart healthcare will be169.32 billion dollars by 2020.
Figure 1.2 Global market growth.
It has also been estimated that the use of robots along with IoTs will increase by 50% in the near future to assist in the healthcare daily activities. Globally, about 60% of the healthcare organizations have implemented IoT devices for their services and facility. This is a digital transformation era for the healthcare services.
1.9 Recent Trends and Discussions
We have discussed about the various applications, advantages, and challenges of IoT in health sectors in the previous sections. The combination of AI and ML along with IoT devices can open up new opportunities in the field of health sectors especially in prediction, detection, risk assessment, treatments, etc. Cloud services can easily be utilized to overcome the limited resources and computational capacity required for the implementation of AI and ML.
The quality of the internet connectivity also needs to be improved, owing to the huge amount of data generated as for real-time data generation, response time, and performance plays a major role. Healthcare professionals should be able to take proactive decisions based on the real-time data to prevent the degradation of health conditions.
Remote diagnostics can be made possible by means of combining big data analytics along with ML techniques and AI by analyzing the vast number of images stored in the database.
Human errors can be reduced due to the