IT SOLUTIONS USED IN THE MEDICAL SECTOR
Explore the technologies that are revolutionizing the HealthTech sector
Wearable devices
Wearable devices are not only electronic gadgets, but are also advanced monitoring devices that are used to save lives. They are used for prophylaxis, monitoring the condition of patients, as well as for taking care of the elderly, children, and people with disabilities. Apart from being used in fitness bands, such solutions can be also found in intelligent hearing aids, medication dosing aids or sugar monitoring for diabetics, and bands with built-in GPS transmitters can save the lives of people with Alzheimer’s or dementia.
Smart home
The Internet of Things model enables the collection of data from data collectors placed not only in wearable devices, but also in home devices and external data sources. Solutions of this type can, for example, monitor the level of air pollution or internal threats (such as CO leakage) and alert the members of the household or rescue services.
Health and fitness
The number of fitness apps best illustrates how many possibilities the use of ubiquitous smartphones offers. Such applications can use standard mobile phone functions to measure user activity (number of kilometers travelled, length and quality of sleep) but can also cooperate with external data sources (like wearable devices). In medicine, these types of applications are also used to perform initial medical examinations (i.e. hearing tests), which are then sent to the attending physician, who uses them as a basis for diagnosis.
Bluetooth Low Energy
Bluetooth Low Energy technology significantly reduces the amount of energy required by sensors which transmit data. As a result, wearables can work much longer without having to be recharged; the batteries themselves, and thus the devices, can be smaller and more convenient to use.
Embedded software
IoT and wearables are mainly made possible due to the miniaturization of processors. Microcomputers embedded in everyday objects equipped with software control the operation of these devices from the inside without the need for external interference. With the help of solutions such as BLE, they can also communicate with each other and with the user. However, embedded software is based on low-level programming, which requires the programmer to know the hardware, in particular the architecture of the microprocessor.
Augmented reality (VR)
Augmented reality images can be displayed on the screen of a computer or phone, but also with customized VR glasses. The potential of this solution in medicine is huge, for example in medical imaging, thanks to which the doctor can see the structure and activities of the internal organs of the patient using VR glasses. Tools of this type can also be used to support surgical procedures, enabling greater precision.
Data analysis
The power of modern computers makes it possible to analyze medical data at a level that was completely unattainable a few short years ago. An excellent example is the IBM Watson Health project, a supercomputer with 2880 cores and 15 terabytes of memory. It uses a combination of algorithms for natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, automatic inference and machine learning. IBM Watson Health is also equipped with medical knowledge based on 600,000 test results, over 2 million pages published in renowned scientific journals, and 1.5 million patient files. The system specializes in the diagnosis of cancer and has a 90% success rate in detecting cancerous changes.
TRUST THE EXPERIENCE OF JCOMMERCE PROFESSIONALS
The technologies listed above do not exhaust the HealthTech solutions catalogue, but at present it is their use that is most frequently discussed. JCommerce developers have experience in creating and developing the presented IT solutions for the medical sector.
