The Convergence of Medicine and IoT Will Change Healthcare Forever

May 3rd, 2016

Awake Goy

In a way, modern medicine has become a victim of it’s own success. Many of past centuries’ scourges have been cured as our understanding of nutrition, sanitation and genetics improves. The result is far longer lives. For the first time in history, we’re approaching a point where there are more elderly people than children on earth.

The implications for our healthcare system are immense. As our population ages, the profile of illness has shifted from infectious diseases, like tuberculosis, to chronic diseases, like cancer and heart disease. These ailments are much more expensive to treat. Many can’t be cured. Soaring costs and a shortage of doctors (the U.S. alone is projected to have a shortage of nearly 90,000 doctors by 2025) leaves hospitals with the task of doing more with less.

Of all the wonders promised by the Internet of Things, its effect on medicine is perhaps the most important, and personal. By 2020, 40% of IoT-related technology will be health-related, more than any other category, making up a $117 billion market. The convergence of medicine and information technologies—medical informatics—will transform healthcare as we know it, curbing costs, reducing inefficiencies, and saving lives.

Intel is involved with this shift at virtually every step. It produces the hardware, like the lightweight, low-powered Intel® Quark™ SoC X1000 and Intel® Atom™ Processor E3800 processors, which makes all kinds of medical and consumer devices “smart.” It designs the developer kits scores of entrepreneurs and engineers are using to bring their own medical apps and gadgets to the market. It provides the cloud infrastructure and computing brawn that puts all those devices in conversation, collecting and analyzing the massive volumes of data biomedical researchers and physicians are using to fight the scourges of our century: cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s, and heart disease.