The Internet of Things (IoT) is a hot topic—it’s attracting attention with the promise to help humans automate routine tasks, particularly record-keeping and failure analysis. The latter is potentially interesting in regulated laboratories. Out-of-specification results (OSR) must be followed up on to discover and mitigate the cause. Also, there is the lurking issue of potential laboratory fraud.
I was attracted to the Healthcare IoT meeting held February 13 and 14 in San Francisco, CA, organized by Cambridge Healthtech Institute and co-located with its Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference. The format of the technical program relied upon panel discussions rather than formal lectures. This suited the state-of-the-art, since real adoption of the IoT is very slow, despite almost intuitive appeal.
The first day of the meeting focused on human factors such as habits and behavior: comparison of fee-for-service to value-based healthcare. Adoption examples were nearly absent.
At lunch on the second day, a team from Microsoft and Northwell Health (a large healthcare provider focused on the New York City metropolitan region) described a wearable device for cardiac monitoring in the cardiac intensive care unit (CICU). Angelo Acquista, M.D. explained that postoperative patients have better outcomes if they sit up or even walk the same day of surgery. While this factor is well-recognized, the out-of-bed protocol is often omitted since preparing the patient to get out of bed is so complicated and time-consuming (about an hour/cycle). Typically, the patient has about a dozen electrical umbilical leads running into sensor devices on or in the body, plus several liquid tubes, including intravenous solutions, cavity drains, and catheter. Using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi technology for two-way communication, it will be possible to remove many of the wires that tie patients to their bed. This should improve patient mobilization and hence patient outcome. The incremental cost should be low, so hospitals may see shorter stays.
Dr. Acquista went on to generalize that the IoT would be justified only when it solved a compelling problem. So, look for the problem, and see if the IoT is key to solving it.
My analysis is that the IoT for healthcare has two problems:
- Compelling examples where IoT is a key enabling technology solving an identified problem are not yet evident.
- Regulatory issues governing healthcare providers, such as privacy and data security, will impede adoption. These handcuffs may not be so restrictive outside the USA or in nonregulated labs globally.
For life science and chemistry labs, finding applications that utilize IoT may be much less complicated. Instrument and device vendors should add IoT communication capability to new products. I’m confident that, in a few years, lab staff will find unanticipated applications leading to widespread adoption and hence reporting.
Robert L. Stevenson, Ph.D., is Editor Emeritus, American Laboratory/Labcompare; e-mail: [email protected]