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Healthcare Internet of Things Market To Grow at 11% CAGR to 2022

The global healthcare Internet of Things market is forecast by Zion Market Research to increase at a robust 11 percent CAGR, reaching $14.7 billion by 2022.

internet of things

Source: Thinkstock

By Fred Donovan

- The global healthcare Internet of Things (IoT) market is forecast by Zion Market Research to increase at a robust 11 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), reaching $14.7 billion by 2022.

Market growth will be fueled by continued implementation of connected diagnostic and therapeutic devices to detect disease and monitor and maintain patient health, the report noted.

In developed countries, IoT has been successfully implemented in a variety of healthcare situations, such as remote monitoring of diabetes and asthma patients, as well as fitness and wellness devices.

The IoT systems and software segment is expected to show the highest growth rate, increasing at a 12.6 percent CAGR through 2022. The remote patient monitoring segment is expected to post an 11.3 percent CAGR through the forecast period. 

At the same time, the professional service segment is expected to be the largest segment of IoT healthcare market, reaching a market value of $2 billion by end 2022.

In terms application, telemedicine is the leading application type in the healthcare IoT market. Zion forecasts that telemedicine will exceed $4.2 billion in market value by 2022, posting a 12.7 percent CAGR over the forecast period.

Due a high rate of adoption, the North America healthcare IoT market has the highest market share at more than 40 percent.

IoT connectivity technology examined in the report include WiFi, Bluetooth Low Energy, Zigbee, near field communication, cellular, and satellite.

Major players in the healthcare IoT market are Cerner, Diabetizer, Infosys, Medtronic, Microsoft, and Proteus Digital Health, according to Zion.

Increasing adoption of healthcare IoT is expected to fuel interest in edge computing, according to a report published by the IEEE Internet of Things Journal.

Healthcare IoT devices produce data at the edge of the network. Edge computing enables processes of the data at its source.

According to the report authors, edge computing includes “enabling technologies allowing computation to be performed at the edge of the network, on downstream data on behalf of cloud services and upstream data on behalf of IoT services." The edge is "any computing and network resources along the path between data sources and cloud data centers.”

“The proliferation of Internet of Things and the success of rich cloud services have pushed the horizon of a new computing paradigm, edge computing, which calls for processing the data at the edge of the network. Edge computing has the potential to address the concerns of response time requirement, battery life constraint, bandwidth cost saving, as well as data safety and privacy,” they observed.

“The demand of geographically distributed data processing applications, i.e., healthcare, requires data sharing and collaboration among enterprises in multiple domains.To attack this challenge, collaborative edge can fuse geographically distributed data by creating virtual shared data views. The virtual shared data is exposed to end users via a predefined service interface,” the authors explained.

“An application will leverage this public interface to compose complex services for end users,” report authors added. “These public services are provided by participants of collaborative edge, and the computation only occurs in the participant’s data facility such that the data privacy and integrity can be ensured.”

Hospitals are dealing with high volumes of IoT devices as more connected medical devices are used in these facilities.

“An average hospital room will have between 15 and 20 medical devices, and almost all of them will be networked,” Aruba Networks' Rick Reid told HITInfrastructure.com. “That’s a pretty high density if you think about the size of an ICU room, which is usually about 15’x15’ with 20 devices in it, and the room next door has 20 devices in it. A ward typically has 20 beds, so that’s quite a lot of devices in a relatively small area.”

Edge computing may become a standard in health IT infrastructure as the proliferation of healthcare IoT devices continues apace.