Introduction
Within the broad field of technology, there have been many areas that serve as the backbone of the healthcare sector and smart devices have been a revolution in the health sector. In just the past two decades, technological advances in the healthcare sector have not only allowed for greater monitoring of human health, but have also paved the way for the growth of the potential commercial market for this sector.
Rapid advancements in the smart devices industry have made smartphones a basic necessity for consumers. AI, coupled with sensor technologies in smartphones, enables the fine tracking of daily routines, physical as well as mental health, which can be used for maintaining a digital diary of the overall human health. This article provides an overview of the different ways in which a smartphone and similar wearable smart devices (such as smartwatches or smart glasses) along with AI can have an impact on the healthcare industry.
The role of smart devices in health care
Smart healthcare systems use many types of electronic medical devices that are always connected to the Internet. They are placed around the person on a regular basis, often at home, and may record data about their daily activities. They may also be linked to networks within health institutions. Data is exchanged and linked using medical knowledge. Users of an intelligent healthcare system are not only medical professionals, but may also be patients, health insurance companies, and their family members.
Remote patient monitoring with the help of smart devices
The remote patient monitoring device continuously measures vital sign parameters, detects life-threatening events and alarms in real time, allows patients to maintain full mobility, and has a wearable, distributed modular architecture.
Remote patient monitoring is an application of wireless devices that autonomously performs medical tests on a patient at a location other than the device. The focus is on creating a low-power device for long-term use. Examples of remote patient monitoring include implanted glucose sensors for continuous, remote glucose monitoring in diabetic patients. Glucose level monitoring currently requires a painful and laborious finger prick. The probes developed can detect glucose concentrations as low as 1 ml with a delay of 10 minutes.
Health tracking and management apps
Various studies emphasize the importance of achieving significant gains by integrating smart devices to monitor healthcare, especially with regard to older people who suffer from chronic diseases. In addition to tracking activities undertaken by patients on a daily basis, monitoring and interpreting data to detect deterioration in health and well-being are important components of intelligent monitoring.
Challenges and Limitations of smart devices
Broader penetrative use of the cited sensors and devices is not possible at the moment and can only be achieved by developing systems that expect to overcome the intrinsic constraints, cost, accuracy, and adaptability. Cost is a noticeable limitation, as early research systems generally target accurate health monitoring and several of the same sensors and devices are proposed to be integrated into widely used retail technology. Accuracy becomes a problem when we want to expand the area of monitoring, while data provide very little clinical interpretation. Since most of these sensors and devices are designed for a particular application, their adaptability is not considered, so the patchwork of clinical evidence, usability, and software support remains untouched. Overall, to deploy these sensors and devices into comprehensive healthcare systems, pervasive multidisciplinary research is required.
This section highlights the key challenges and some limitations associated with the proliferation of smart devices in the healthcare domain. Security and privacy are two of the most important issues in the proliferation of smart devices. In addition, latency and reliability are important technical challenges which need to be managed. Standardization of smart devices can catalyze their adoption by healthcare providers and end-users. A study on the global smart home healthcare market observes that the high cost of technology adoption in the healthcare domain is harming global market expansion. A plethora of healthcare sensors and devices developed by research communities across the globe can treat various diseases and analyze a range of symptoms. However, there are limitations associated with this growing market, wherein current system products allow for partial sensing and analysis. These solutions present domain-specific constraints, are proprietary in nature, and are, for the most part, custom-made. Some of the factors that limit these systems include cost, accuracy, and power consumption.
Concerns regarding data security related to smart devices
It doesn’t help that while the majority of healthcare systems currently have security-compliant IoT devices, they don’t have any security in place at all, according to a report by Irdeto. This can be troubling as we move towards increased reliance on healthcare systems. As we have seen from ransomware attacks to hospitals and medical services for money, security is essential in the healthcare industry. Speech recognition is becoming a common feature in new kinds of health tech, including hearing aids, electronic health records, etc. This will create a huge increase in the collection and monitoring of everyday speech data. This might be required for the development and performance of a machine-to-speech system but raises worries about data personalization and privacy, especially if these smart devices really were just recording and listening 24/7.
Data security concerns are raised because of the kind of sensitive health information that smart devices will naturally need to use. “22% of Android apps and 4.8% of iOS apps are sharing information with third parties that can be used to personally identify individuals, and some of these partners are health and medical organizations.” These are a major concern, especially because not every organization that shares this information has to follow the strict standards of HIPAA.
Conclusion and implications for the future
It is clear that the intelligent features provided by smart healthcare devices will be able to transform the performance of the healthcare system in a way that has never been seen before. However, they must be developed in an ethical and safe manner. Future work may extend this literature study by analyzing the relevance and quality of information provided by the examined papers, or by incorporating other common application areas of smart devices, such as wearables
