Smart watches, driverless cars and internet enabled fridges may grab headlines, but the internet of things has the potential to transform healthcare and save lives, Telstra chief scientist Hugh Bradlow says.
The move to wireless technology has rapidly changed the way people live their lives and further advances are enabling more and more connected devices, creating an ecosystem of machines able to communicate not only with users but with each other, known as the internet of things (IoT).
On a mission: Telstra chief scientist Dr Hugh Bradlow believes some deaths caused by heart attacks could be prevented with the right technology. Photo: Josh Robenstone
Dr Bradlow, speaking at the IoT Connect 14 conference in Sydney, said there was huge potential in combining internet-connected health devices on a persons body with data analysis to help react faster to, or even pre-empt, a medical emergency.
Companies around the world have already created shirts with electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring, i.e. a shirt that reads the wearer’s heart rate.
“Let’s take an example of a world where we do have TGA [Therapeutic Goods Administration] approve single lead ECG, or even multi-lead ECG,” Dr Bradlow said.
“That ECG is able to transmit to your phone via Bluetooth low energy, that information is then sent via Wi-Fi through your gateway, or through your 4G network into a cloud data centre and at that point you have a data lake of millions of people’s ECG data there.”
With data from millions of different people, real-time analytics can then detect for anomalies.
Saving lives
“Anomaly detection is the name of the game here because if you remember Crazy John, John Ilhan, who died of a heart attack, he had some symptoms in the morning but had nothing prior to that and he died in the afternoon,” Dr Bradlow said.
“In this utopian world I’m portraying, he would have got a signal in the morning that says this guy has an anomaly, it would have alerted a human being, the human being would have dispatched an ambulance, he would have been put in hospital and his life would have been saved. This is truly life saving technology.”
But, the move into a more connected world is not without complications, especially in health.
“Everyone’s dead scared of getting into the healthcare space because of the regulatory issues there,” Dr Bradlow said. “It does raised what I call the Ghostbusters question, which is, ‘Who are you going to call?’ The problem is who is responsible for this M2M [machine-to-machine] flow. That’s not clear.”
Other risks include the instability of Bluetooth, smartphones being like computers with congestion, virus’, bugs and other faults, human error and the possibility of dispatching too many unneeded ambulances or services, or worse – the technology suggesting no symptoms are there when they are, which could lead to death.
Cisco chief technology officer Kevin Bloch agreed that there is a great opportunities for the internet of things to improve healthcare.
Internet connected pills
“In the US alone, the cost of people not taking their medication is $US290 billion [$340 billion] per annum,” Mr Bloch said. “This is not a child’s game that we’re playing. We’re not just talking about value at stake, we’re talking about life at stake.”
A company in the United Kingdom, Proteus, has developed a pill which once it dissolves in the patients stomach connects with a patch on the skin, then connecting with the phone, which then sends a message to a clinician that it has been taken, Mr Bloch said.
“The clinician doesn’t call you unless you’ve forgotten to take your pill.”
While Dr Bradlow would not elaborate on exactly what Telstra was developing in terms of products that take advantage of the internet of things, the telecommunications provider has already begun investing in the e-health sector and has stressed its importance as part of the company’s strategy.
In October, Telstra partnered with a major Swiss provider of online healthcare services, Medgate, to form ReadyCare, a service which lets patients get consultations and prescriptions from doctors over the phone or via video links at all hours.