Understanding The Verticals Part 6: Enhancing Health & Wellness and Revitalizing Education
As part of Charlie’s connected lifestyle, he has register with his nearby hospital workout gym facility that links his records with his primary physician, pharmacist, and medical insurance company. With Charlie’s participation in preventive care and exercising at the gym, his insurance company extends him discounts on his premium. He downloaded a health and wellness app onto his smartphone and linked it to his Apple Watch so that it can collect data when Charlie is at the gym, walking to work, or walking in that park during the weekends. This data is automatically forwarded to his doctor as well.
As result of his love for fitness and the outdoors, Charlie accesses the city government’s park system to secure his participation in the city’s kayaking competition and sends a Facebook message to his friends so that they can sponsor him. The money collected will be donated to Charlie’s favorite charitable organization.
After his doctor reviewed the data and gave Charlie a clean bill of health, his insurance company awarded additional discounts to Charlie for staying healthy.
On the career front, Charlie planned to stay up to date on the changes in his profession and decided to enroll for a certification program. He started taking the self-paced three months online classes with a certification examination at the end. Charlie’s weekly progress will also be tracked to show him how he is doing and what corrective actions to take, if need be.
In all, during the period, Charlie traversed multiple smart city verticals – city government, health and wellness, education, and IoT infra.
Health & Wellness Vertical
Challenges
In general, challenges in the health and wellness sector are primarily the escalating cost of healthcare, readily available and affordable health/wellness facilities, access to quality care, and shortage of care providers. From a smart city perspective within the health & wellness vertical, the issues that IoT technology will help resolve will focus on data collection, data processing and analytics, and decision-making and actions. As a result, the challenges associated with this vertical are as follows:
Consumers’ willingness to wear smart data sources (a.k.a. sensors and/or devices). Smart devices must be improved. The reluctance is due to issues such as the devices being intrusive, clumsy, bulky, and privacy. In addition, there is the issue of consumer experience and availability of approved IoT technology medical device implants.
Connectivity for health and wellness data collection. For example, how do you transfer data collected from an implanted nano-technology IoT device to an aggregator or a gateway network element?
Where should the intelligence for the next best actions reside for IoT-based health and wellness solutions? Specifically, should the processing and analytics for the next best action occur at the data source, or away from the device’s footprint and action transmitted to the device? In healthcare, seconds delay in taking the next best action could result in a catastrophic outcome.
Personalized and secured consumer control health management capability. This is where consumers have control of how their health care is management, especially, with the increased acceptance of digital technology and IoT based solutions in healthcare.
Interconnection issues where hospitals, pharmacists and caregivers are not connected and being compounded by lack of standards for digital health records.
The applicability and acceptance of IoT technology can help resolve the health and wellness challenges mentioned above including access to preventive care, scaling of health care system delivery, etc.
Solutions within the health & wellness vertical
Examples of solutions in the health and wellness vertical are provided in the diagram below advocating collaboration, connected solutions, secured data access, smart devices, and health IT-as-a-Service solutions.
Opportunities
According to Hexa Report, the global smart healthcare market is estimated to be USD 225.54 billion by 2022. The, U.S. will spent $2.38 trillion on healthcare in 2008, while 45.7 million citizens remained uninsured.
Education Vertical
Challenges
If the intent in the education vertical is to leverage smart technologies to improve the educational opportunities for all the city’s citizens/learners (early childhood through high school, vocational school, college to post graduate, and special needs students) to develop the high value and skilled 21st century workforce. Then the challenges envisioned from a smart city perspective include:
Availability of IoT technology driven personalized smart learning environment – with the knowledge of what the learner needs, interests background, preferences, and experience to support self-paced personalized services, personalized content, independent learning infrastructure, and also do the same for learners in a formal learning setting.
Secured access to smart education-learning facilities for individuals, groups (where collaboration is the key), class, and masses. In addition, access to real-time data and empirical learner’s profile with skills and acquired knowledge.
Leveraging cyber-physical technology and IoT-based connected learning environment to support cognizant, mobile and ubiquitous (anytime, anywhere, any device) learning.
Continuous updating of libraries under the best practice governance process to support on-going re-tooling (a.k.a. new skills) and alignment with the economic landscape.
Solutions within the smart education vertical
The smart education solutions shown in the diagram below provide a view into the examples of how IoT technology would support a city’s smart education vertical.
Opportunities
The estimated global education technology and smart classroom market size is expected to grow from USD 43.27 billion in 2015 to USD 93.76 billion by 2020.
Next week, we will focus on unpacking the IoT Infrastructure vertical