With COVID-19, the world has gone from pandemic-reactive to pandemic-proactive. Governments and individuals alike are searching for every new avenue to keep their regions and communities healthy and not just effectively battle COVID-19 but be much better prepared for any future pandemics.
While there is still much to be learned about how certain diseases spread and how best to treat them, IoT technology provides many ways to stay health and become proactive about personal health and wellness.
Here’s the top IoT and smart device technology for health and wellness:
1. Telehealth
Embedded IoT chips and sensors have enabled a whole new paradigm of healthcare: remote monitoring. About 30% of all surgery patients re-admit to the hospital within 30 days, mainly due to lack of monitoring or inadequate monitoring.
Telehealth
Now, wearable smart devices with embedded sensors allow doctors to remotely monitor everything from blood glucose levels to drug adherence and get automatic, regular updates. A few companies are even making “smart pills” that can provide detailed information on a patient’s health in real time and also ensure a patient is sticking to a prescribed medication regimen.
2. Smart home medical devices
If having a smart pill feeding data to your doctor remotely sounds a little too intrusive to you, there are a number of less intrusive smart options for home care.
A smart thermometer can be used to correlate your body temperature with your age, weight, and gender and link to your smart phone, which can provide recommendations to help you feel better and will keep track of your body temperature trends for later analysis. Likewise, a smart blood pressure monitor uses a smart phone app to record, analyze, and present the results, feeding the data directly to your doctor and giving you data-based recommendations for getting blood pressure levels back to normal.
Smart home medical devices
Smart devices for checking, monitoring and analyzing personal health abound. Just make sure the supplier is reputable and also has the proper IoT ecosystem security in place.
3. Purifiers, humidifiers, and dehimidifiers
Air purifiers remove contaminants from the air and improve indoor air quality, which is essential for staying healthy when stuck at home.
Humidifiers add moisture to the air to help treat dryness to the ears, nose, and throat.
Dehumidifiers reduce humidity levels to make your home less hospitable to dust and mold and other things that tend to cause allergies.
Purifiers, humidifiers, and dehimidifiers
All of the above comes in “smart” versions that link up with smart phone applications to allow you to control them remotely, schedule “scenes” by linking them with other smart technology in your home, and record and analyze important data that shows what effect they are having on your home and health.
There’s more to health-related smart devices than just the above, of course. Every day companies are coming out with new and innovative smart products to address every aspect of human health, from how we take medicine to how long we have to wait for emergency treatment.
In a time when “taking care” has taken on a whole new meaning, one can never be too safe, or too smart.
