Statista predicts the global digital health market size to grow to nearly $640 billion by 2026.

How Technology Transforms Healthcare:

The healthcare industry can leverage technology-driven solutions to gain significant advantages in how data is stored, how patients are treated, and how medical care is provided. For example, cloud-based electronic health records (EHR) simplify data storage and access via a centralized system allowing to drastically cut costs and ensure the ability to easily manage and access the database. Diabetics, for instance, can apply IoT-powered mobile medical devices to permanently monitor glucose levels in their blood to timely prevent hyperglycemia. Also, Virtual Reality solutions have been already applied by medical institutions to ease symptoms of depression and anxiety in patients with mental illnesses. And it’s only some of the examples.

Before outlining the core benefits it is worth mentioning that big data in the healthcare industry requires approaches to efficiently capture, store, analyze, and manage data to make comprehensive predictions about possible diseases and epidemics, identify risk factors, enhance clinical researches and trials, prevent deaths, etc. With digital technology and cloud data storage, the healthcare industry is able to facilitate efficient health information exchange and get cost-effective solutions without the need for additional expenses on hardware. Technology-driven data collection is conducted in a much more fast manner and from a much more diverse population than ever before.
Here are the main drivers of technological shifts in the healthcare sector:

Enhanced and more accessible treatment
Facilitation of chronic disease prevention and management
Reduction of care costs
Remote patients’ monitoring and control
Improved access to medical data
Improved communication flows
Better diagnostic support
Predictive analytics
Cost reduction

IoT-powered Virtual Healthcare

In order to improve the efficiency of communication between patients and healthcare providers and enable accessibility and convenience to healthcare services remotely, healthcare organizations are empowered with the technology presented in the form of electronic communication (digital communication), aka telehealth or telemedicine.

Telehealth allows not only streamlining the patient’s experience and saving time but also cutting costs, improving health outcomes, and taking preventative care to the next level.

According to a Deloitte survey conducted among US physicians in terms of virtual health perspectives, we can see that most physicians were not intending to use most of the virtual health solutions before COVID-19. However, in March-May 2020, there was an unprecedented shift and gradual increase in the use of virtual health.

Besides that, connected HVAC platforms can give the users direct access to the power consumption and carbon dioxide emissions stats; they’ll provide deep insight into what kind of a carbon footprint buildings leave behind.
Here’s a potential scenario of a modern HVAC system contributing to energy usage minimization.

Suppose a client’s connected platform is set to turn on air conditioning at 5 pm – the homeowner usually comes back at 7 pm, and it takes about two hours to achieve the most comfortable temperature conditions. However, one day an urgent meeting occurs, and the tenant can’t make it home till 9 pm. If the data from Google Calendar and Google Maps is incorporated into the HVAC infrastructure, the system will recognize the scheduled meeting, take into account expected traffic conditions, and postpone the devices’ activation till, say, 7.30 in the evening. For people with flexible work schedules, the connected platforms can save them lots of money.
Seeing large organizations throw their hats into the IoT ring has inspired multiple smaller HVAC manufacturers to follow suit. They, too, aim to employ the latest tech to reinvent their business models and go from simply selling and deploying HVAC devices (and fixing the broken appliances) to offering predictive maintenance and other high-level HVAC services around them.

If you happen to be one of the suppliers seeking to harness the power of IoT, you might, following the giants’ lead, start equipping your appliances with more sensors, gathering all the operational data and leveraging the cloud, from a trustworthy provider, to implement analytics functionality. Including connectivity into equipment will help increase its life-span, stay connected with clients and increase their satisfaction by continuously improving the products.

The software is usually set up to generate dynamic alerts upon spotting abnormal behavior, such as power consumption that exceeds the baseline upper bound defined by the system managers. Although the won’t be able to fix the issues themselves, their dynamic notifications can bring forward routine on-site checks and thus ensure no catastrophic failures ever happen. HVAC providers, who have switched to a proactive mode, will find the lifespans of their hardware substantially increased.

2- Plan out the app development. Some execs assume that remote control of HVAC appliances, from mobile or web apps, is just an add-on feature when, in fact, it should be woven into each stage of the connected product engineering. The app’s capabilities must be thought out in advance and questions such as the following must be addressed at the project’s outset:
Will the users be able to manage through the app’s dashboard several stand-alone HVAC systems at once?
Will the remote, off-site controlling capabilities be limited for security purposes?
What if the internet connection crashes or the device’s battery dies out? Have we an efficient system in place to collect and update local behavior while offline?

3- Ensure Over-The-Air (OTA) updates are easy to implement. This is one of the key advantages associated with the IoT and a distinctive feature of connected devices – their improvement continues after the installation is done.
Make sure you devise a method for adding new features to HVAC tools quickly and that the system can be modified, without undue delays, to suit the client’s preferences. That said, don’t neglect safety measures either: All the state-of-art protection methods must be applied and the security system itself must be updated, via OTA communication, whenever necessary.

4- Do not experiment with hardware. When it comes to networking protocols and connectivity, you shouldn’t take any chances: don’t stuff your equipment with shoddy Wi-Fi chips from some no-name supplier to save a few dollars. You want the wireless connectivity in your HVAC system to have a full networking stack and opting for the premium hardware most leading smartphones are already using is the best way to ensure that. Premium hardware will also help deliver high-level security, prevent insufficient wireless range or lack of compatibility.