Smart Homes Open Up New Approaches and Business Models for Healthcare Delivery

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

As healthcare shifts from reactive to proactive care, a huge market is opening for automation products that can help deliver health and wellness services through smart homes. The ubiquity of broadband connectivity, development of smart sensors, and the decreasing costs of devices have already made it possible to offer aging-in-place, chronic disease management, and post-acute care services in smart homes. However, digital health vendors are striving to take telehealth to the next level by developing solutions that will allow care givers to check on the health of all the residents of the house, not just the patient's, monitor diet and nutrition, the environment, and overall wellness, and be integrable with existing and newer systems.

Patients are conscious of their health quotient and want to be involved in the wellness and disease management,” said Sowmya Rajagopalan, global program director Transformational Health. “With consumerization of healthcare, enabling patients to clinically manage their disease at home has been of crucial importance for care providers and OEMs today as they have made this a reality with the launch of innovation in design, devices, services, and solutions.”

Frost & Sullivan’s recent analysis, Vision 2025—Healthcare in the Smart Home, examines the concept of a smart home delivering healthcare. It segments all the resident profiles and lists the individual health needs that are relevant to healthcare delivery in the home. It also highlights the key companies in this space as well as the major business models and future evolution trends. It covers the technologies of home automation, voice virtual assistants, artificial intelligence (AI), and analytics. The health and wellness segment of connected homes market revenues was $6.67 billion, and it is expected to grow to $22.26 billion by 2022, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.3% between 2017 and 2022.

Companies like Google, Samsung, Philips, and Deutsch Telekom have unique capabilities and value propositions to serve the smart homes for healthcare delivery area, with their smart solutions. There are further expansion opportunities in the healthcare segment:

• Providing an intelligent layer that will collect and analyze data to generate precise, customized insights for sharing with residents, caregivers, and clinical care teams;
• Developing solutions that enable further actions, such as hailing an ambulance or notifying the care team of a heart attack or a fall;
• Enhancing pre-defined architecture, protocols, and standards to enable easier integration of products into platforms; and
• Offering smart thermostats, virtual voice assistance devices, and smart security systems, in addition to ensuring tech development for residents, patients and caregivers.

"Any solution that can monitor the health of various individuals in a single house, using cross-industry business models, while operating in a stringently regulated industry, will have to be highly dynamic, integrable, and interoperable," noted Siddharth Shah Industry Analyst Transformational Health. "While the barriers to market entry seem high, there are substantial opportunities for automation and healthtech vendors that are keen to develop technologies, products, and models for this market."

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