Why India needs IoT in Healthcare
How wearable-tech delivering connected healthcare can leverage power of community to deal with medical emergencies and save lives
Heart Attack or Cardiac Arrest is one of the biggest killers in India. Nearly one-third of deaths in urban India are due to cardiovascular ailments, and that number is nearly one-fourth in rural India.
Imagine what ground breaking change connected-health or IoT in healthcare can bring to this. Imagine people diagnosed with heart related issues or having a family history of heart ailments can have a device or wearable on them which can monitor their vitals every minute or seconds. Imagine their personal doctor, sitting remotely can monitor those vitals. Imagine a computer tracing those data and using the power of data-analytics can warn the person or his doctor of a possibility of incumbent heart attack. Having such warnings even an hour or two before could definitely save a person’s life esp. in India where reaching hospitals on time is a far-fetched dream.
Further on, for a patient having a heart attack, research indicates that the first five minutes are the most crucial ones. Receiving a CPR within the first minutes increases the chances of survival by many fold. Though CPRs are not that complicated, it’s hard to bring everyone on a platform of social responsibility and get them comfortable with this basic form of First Help. However, heart patients will be more than happy to learn the basic techniques of giving a CPR to a person in need.
Now, imagine when all those wearables can talk to each other, like a secret network of patients. Imagine when a person suffers a ‘sudden’ heart attack and his device can communicate to the nearest device which will tell it’s wearer via some service that there is a person suffering from heart attack and he could help him survive.
This is just one scenario where IoT in healthcare or connected care can disrupt the complete healthcare industry by bridging the gap between a patients and the hospitals/doctors. In India where 70% of the population lives in rural area without any direct access to health facilities, tele-healthcare could serve a great purpose. In a country which is obsessed with customer service, imagine the value addition hospitals can provide to their premium patients while the patients get utmost care from hospitals. The possibilities are endless, and so endless are the models of effectively monetizing this like every business.
Agreed there are several challenges, esp. with the healthcare segment. But, we need to start somewhere.
While you ponder over this, here is an excellent TED Talk on Connected Healthcare by Eric Dishman of Intel.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on March 9, 2016.
