The Problems caused by smart health monitoring systems

The Problems caused by smart health monitoring systems

            The rapid development of smart health monitoring system has developed over the last two decades to improve the healthcare system. Despite healthcare management systems being able to monitor patients’ task automatically, the ability of it being efficient in clinical setups is still questionable. A large number of people are unable to access proper health monitoring systems making its efficiency and clinical acceptability a problem. Therefore, the main aim of this research is to identify the leading role played by smart health systems and how they can be made accessible to patients.

Electronic health systems have witnessed an increased number of patients with chronic diseases. For instance, America has been having an increased number of budget allocation to deal with chronic illnesses to take more than 80% of the healthcare budget. This is because chronic diseases are a burden to people in healthcare sectors because of the unplanned visits to the emergency departments. The unplanned visits will interfere with the delivery of other services because the smart health monitoring service cannot help where the situation is critical and needs urgent medical conditions..

Distributed data stream challenge is yet another problem of the smart health monitoring systems. The fact that smartphones use sensors, remotes, and other electronic gadgets may wear out after sometime inconveniencing an individual who is monitoring their health. Therefore, several studies have proven some sensors, computers, the internet, and wireless communications have proved to be wearable after some time, and this limits clinical adequacy through improper health monitoring and deterioration of health and development of complications.

Patients prefer to use healthcare monitoring systems sometimes because of the challenge of hospitals being located far, and they cannot access them in the required time. Increased demand for healthcare services has led scholars to find out the role played by e-health services. Medical centers have not yet understood the need for developing such systems, especially with the increasing demand. Therefore, each research needs to identify a disease and develop real-time remote monitoring systems that can be used to address patients who live far from hospitals and other medical centers. Therefore, medical sensors help to identify and monitor a patient’s condition, and this gives an idea on which patient to prioritize depending on the severity of the condition.

Internet accessibility depends on the availability of data from the national level. Moreover, the low transmission of energy levels required to run electronic devices has also affected the accessibility of major healthcare systems. This has affected people living in rural areas, and accessing the internet is a problem since many service providers cannot reach them. Vendors and manufacturers of such devices can make devices that include pressure, weight, and glucose levels in the blood. These smart devices act as sensors and should be able to interact with other devices to send information to a healthcare facility so that conditions can be monitored. This brings the issue of all smart devices being compatible with other systems and being able to send real-time results for better enhancement.

Many older people tend to live far from hospitals, and this makes it difficult to access healthcare services. Furthermore, older adults are generally weak and need urgent medical attention in most cases. Therefore, this brings up the need to have innovations and ideas on how nurses can handle patients from their homes and enhance safety in emergency cases. Such technical developments that need to be addressed include developing single case solutions, and complex ambient assisted living systems for identifying emergency cases and for cases of encouraging home stays using the smart healthcare technologies accessible from home. Having this can make it easy for healthcare facilities to assign home nurses for their patients and monitor conditions to cater to emergencies during the stay at home.

Impacts of the problems on relevant stakeholders

Patients are motivated when they take part in the health monitoring process. This is because the healthcare monitoring systems provide the patient with electronic health history and recommendations from previous checkups (Aziz et al., 2016). They are also able to gain knowledge on the sign and symptoms of medical conditions and can monitor changes they have in their bodies. Medical staff and patients can exchange information on various medical issues. These include information on diseases, medicines, and therapies that can be administered in certain conditions. The knowledge shared makes it easy for communication, and it eases workflow procedures within a medical facility.

Using technological health monitoring devices helps to realize dramatic savings for both the hospital and the patient. The general feeling of healthcare conditions is that they are expensive due to a variety of factors. With the technological shift, a majority of these unrealizable expenses can be dealt with. It also helps to reduce errors and malpractices, and it makes it possible to have an effective communication system that makes service delivery more efficient, and this reduces operational and other related costs (Pramanik et al., 2017). Impersonalization of care has helped in making healthcare providers give a quick and real-time diagnosis. It has been achieved by the electronic sensors which use algorithms to classify data and identify the problem affecting the patient and give appropriate medication and therapies to help solve the issue. Having accurate data makes it easy for healthcare providers to come up with recommendations capable of delivering the required results.

Finally, health outcomes help to increase coordination and improve outcomes. Because of the healthcare system getting more specialized, it makes a patient interact with different health personnel within a medical facility (Petersen et al., 2015). The development of electronic health records (EHR’S) has made the flow of events in the hospital easy because data is sent to the next healthcare giver. From this, coordination of duties is improved and simplified, making the clients get satisfaction. When duties and delivery of information are well-coordinated, the patient can have improved outcomes through improved health conditions and reduced stays in medical facilities. Therefore, the undergoing changes in the medical field are highly associated with coordination, efficiency, and improved care.

The relevance of the solutions with standards, laws, and regulations

Smart care health solutions need to be monitored to ensure that they meet the required standards as required by the law. It is also important for the systems to have less or, if possible, lack any negative impact on the patients (Alotaibi, & Federico, 2017). The effectiveness of such systems should be upheld at all costs. The relevant bodies such as the World Health Organization (WHO) gives guidelines on these systems, and the developers are keen on ensuring they deliver the best solutions according to stipulated guidelines.

There was the incorporation of a remote system that was monitoring a patient’s condition via Bluetooth. It proved to be convenient for both the patient and the patient. It was achievable because neither the doctor had to visit the patients’ home, nor the patient had to visit the hospital, and this proved to be relevant. The medical healthcare systems are required to be cost-effective, especially with the increasing demand. Most of these technologies have achieved this since the costs of traveling to hospitals to seek treatment are reduced, and this has proven the cost-efficiency aspect as a requirement.

The International Standards Organization (ISO) has set standards on the type of medical technologies being implemented to solve medical conditions. Therefore, devices are required to be compatible with other devices because of the different technological levels in different states and places (Badawi et al., 2019). This expansive link of innovation is appropriate in the industrial evolution of healthcare. ISO also provided guidelines and a framework in which all wireless connections should connect through short-range connections such as Bluetooth and wireless fidelity modules. Therefore, this has seen a lot of manufacturers of healthcare devices focus more on short-range communication mediums with requirement standards set by ISO.

Finally, there are standards for bedside devices depending on data and service models, and also the transport specifications for these devices. The development of this standard was to address to solve the sharing of data between healthcare devices and other computerized devices to analyze psychological data. Although the world is prepared for the development of new ideas, it is important to have devices that are environmentally friendly and pose less threat to medical staff. They should have a manageable power consumption rate with few or, if possible, have no side effects on human health.

References

Alotaibi, Y. K., & Federico, F. (2017). The impact of health information technology on patient safety. Saudi medical journal, 38(12), 1173.

Aziz, K., Tarapiah, S., Ismail, S. H., & Atalla, S. (2016, March). Smart real-time healthcare monitoring and tracking system using GSM/GPS technologies. In 2016 3rd MEC International Conference on Big Data and Smart City (ICBDSC) (pp. 1-7). IEEE.

Badawi, H., Laamarti, F., Arafsha, F., & El Saddik, A. (2019, February). Standardizing a shoe insole based on ISO/IEEE 11073 personal health device (X73-PHD) standards. In International Conference on Information Technology & Systems (pp. 764-778). Springer, Cham.

Petersen, C., Adams, S. A., & DeMuro, P. R. (2015). mHealth: Don’t forget all the stakeholders in the business case. Medicine 2.0, 4(2).

Pramanik, M. I., Lau, R. Y., Demirkan, H., & Azad, M. A. K. (2017). Smart health: Big data enabled health paradigm within smart cities. Expert Systems with Applications, 87, 370-383.