The Convergence of Medicine and IoT Will Change Healthcare Forever

In a way, modern medicine has become a victim of it's own success. Many of past centuries' scourges have been cured as our understanding of nutrition, sanitation and genetics improves. The result is far longer lives. For the first time in history, we're approaching a point where there are more elderly people than children on earth.

The implications for our healthcare system are immense. As our population ages, the profile of illness has shifted from infectious diseases, like tuberculosis, to chronic diseases, like cancer and heart disease. These ailments are much more expensive to treat. Many can't be cured. Soaring costs and a shortage of doctors (the U.S. alone is projected to have a shortage of nearly 90,000 doctors by 2025) leaves hospitals with the task of doing more with less.

Of all the wonders promised by the Internet of Things, its effect on medicine is perhaps the most important, and personal. By 2020, 40% of IoT-related technology will be health-related, more than any other category, making up a $117 billion market. The convergence of medicine and information technologies—medical informatics—will transform healthcare as we know it, curbing costs, reducing inefficiencies, and saving lives.

Intel is involved with this shift at virtually every step. It produces the hardware, like the lightweight, low-powered Intel® Quark™ SoC X1000 and Intel® Atom™ Processor E3800 processors, which makes all kinds of medical and consumer devices "smart." It designs the developer kits scores of entrepreneurs and engineers are using to bring their own medical apps and gadgets to the market. It provides the cloud infrastructure and computing brawn that puts all those devices in conversation, collecting and analyzing the massive volumes of data biomedical researchers and physicians are using to fight the scourges of our century: cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's, and heart disease.

A hospital in Ninjing, China illustrates how the revolution in medicine will look in practice. A patient with diabetes now has an ID card that, when scanned, links to a secure cloud where their electronic health record—vitals and lab results, medical and prescription histories—is stored. Physicians and nurses can easily access this record on a tablet or desktop computer.

It sounds pretty basic, but electronic health records are a game changer. In less than a decade, an ink-and-paper system of managing records that goes back thousands of years was digitized and replaced. The advantages are obvious and many. Paper records, written in questionable penmanship, get stuffed away in filing cabinets, out of the reach of researchers or other healthcare providers. So having all the important information in one place, easily sharable, will eliminate many inefficiencies, and save lives.

Also accessible to physicians and researchers are entirely new streams of data, provided by sensors in "smart" medical devices. One of the major challenges to implementing the IoT is that, though many devices now have sensors to collect data, they often talk with the server in their own language. Manufacturers each have their own proprietary protocols, which means sensors by different makers can't necessarily speak with each other. This fragmented software environment, coupled with privacy concerns and the bureaucratic tendency to hoard the information it collects, maroons valuable info on data islands, undermining the whole idea of the IoT.

The Nexcom Gateway NIO 1000, which is used by the hospital in Ninjing, relies on Intel technologies like Quark processors and Intel® IoT Gateways software stack to bridge that communication gap. The gateway collects in one place all the data gathered by the sensor-embedded devices—regardless of the language they speak—and uploads it to a secure cloud. It's an end-to-end solution that's scalable and totally customizable, capable of adapting to legacy codes and different platforms.

Electronic health records will save a lot of money. It will also improve the quality of care, which providing researchers with hitherto inconceivable volumes of data that could unlock the secrets of our genetics, making truly personalized medicine possible. Precision medicine, as it's called, is a term you'll no doubt be hearing often in the coming years. It begins with genomics. Many of the diseases that continue to bedevil biomedical researchers are rooted in the genome; since each person is different, you can never be sure how someone they will respond to a certain kind of cancer, for instance, and the course of treatment it requires

In 2015, Intel and the Oregon Health and Science University launched a joint project, the Collaborative Cancer Cloud: a high-performance analytics platform that collects and securely stores private medical data that can be used for cancer research. Though it begins with cancer, Intel intends to open up the federated cloud network to other institutions, includings ones working on a cure to diseases like Parkinson's. By 2020, their goal is to be able to fully map an individual's genome in a single day, a process that currently takes hundreds of hours of compute time. Using this information, they can craft a course of treatment bespoke to that person's genes and environment, paving the way for truly precise healthcare, perhaps the next miracle of medicine.

Learn more about how you can get started with Intel® IoT

If you are a developer and want to be involved in changing the world for the better through Intel® IoT, explore some of the tools that are right at your fingertips:

• Move rapidly from Prototype to Production
• Choose the Right IoT Gateway
• Download the Intel® IoT Developer Kit