WHO on March 11th declared Covid19 as a global pandemic which itself reveals the magnitude and fatal effect of this virus. In this current situation, still, countries around the world are facing challenges to contain this virus from further spreading through self-disciplinary action of social distancing. The technologies, however, help the businesses go up and running to prevent global economic slowdown.

What are the key pain points regarding this COVID19?

As one of the main problems with the coronavirus when compared to its predecessors SARS or Ebola is, these spread like fire and quarantine measures are mandatory. But the basic structural problem faced by all the Government health care systems is how to break the chain from spreading this virus, which is highly contagious from patients to doctors, nurses, and other clinical frontline helpers.

Detecting the origin of the outbreak, tracking other persons who may be in contact with the patient, we need to scale up and automate which helps to analyze the trend and pattern and monitor the overall progress whether strict quarantines are taking place as Government orders.

How IoT can overcome the pandemic outbreak

“Post COVID19, IoT will see a huge boost especially in healthcare technologies to meet the demand of remote monitoring, data analysis, and more smart devices changing the design of healthcare manufacturing systems.” – Granzen, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

This is definitely the testing period and critical time for the healthcare industry, but thanks to the advancement in technologies like IoT where there are several connected healthcare systems are already in place. With proper IoT implementation, it can take off a huge workload from the medical staff by simplifying their tasks.

• Using IoT technology, we can check if people are adhering to the quarantine rules like staying indoors through drones and track down the people who breach it.
• Use of IoT telemetry solutions to monitor remotely the high-risk conditions and get biometric measurements of critical metric like heart rate, glucose level etc.
• IoT can assist the epidemiologists to specifically locate the patients’ whereabouts, the outbreak origin, infected areas by geographical zone precisely.

Applications of IoT for COVID 19

Minimizing the hospital in-patient visit is the need of the hour. IoT helps to streamline the basic health needs by constantly offering an intercommunication model between patient and medical staff for non-critical issues through online consulting, wearables devices that sense and detect any abnormalities instantly to the medical team.

Remote Patient Monitoring

Remote patient monitoring is made possible through the development of the internet of things through smart devices by sharing real-time patient’s data to healthcare professionals.

Wearable Sensor Devices

Health vital stats are sent from the wearable device to the mobile app & AWS cloud. Get panic alerts, google maps, increase the doctor-patient communication.

Patient-Generated Health Data

PGHD is the smart healthcare monitoring system to map electronic health gadgets like the smartwatch, smart oximeter etc to align with real-time patient’s data.

Connected thermometers

Through drones now patients can take the temperature through the Infrared thermometer and upload it in the mobile device and send it to the cloud data for analysis. In this way, healthcare workers can collect routine temp data through this door-door system, avoiding cross-patient infections.

Smart Medical devices

Predictive maintenance for medical devices with embedded IoT sensors tracks and reduces manual errors. Automated clinical workflows monitor the device’s health status.

CONTUS’ capabilities and its expertise in IoT

CONTUS IoT Digital Engine has an enterprise-grade technology stack which helps to improve and create machine 2 machine communication effectively. It has developed several smart healthcare systems and provided data analytics with powerful BI tools including Tableau, Power BI, etc.

The main driving forces of IoT solutions include power connectivity, cloud sync, and sensor boards to create an interactive user application.

Conclusion

The data collected from the IoT devices must be quickly collected, processed, and analyzed to make better medical decisions. However, the healthcare infrastructure should be adaptable to the new changes and be prepared for any kind of global outbreaks like COVID19. Hence, there is no doubt that IoT would come out stronger and smarter after this pandemic settles down. Remote sensor monitoring will play a big part in more innovative IoT healthcare solutions.