Fifty million people could benefit from wireless home health care monitoring, according to a new study from research firm Berg Insight.
The holdup is the lack of commercial products that enable distance monitoring of, say, glucose level meters or blood pressure monitors. The problem comes down to a wide gap between health care and mobile provider approaches to technology, said Tobias Ryberg, a senior analyst for Berg Insight.
“The few telehealth solutions that do exist are not just one, but often several, generations behind in terms of technology,” said Tobias Ryberg, senior analyst at Berg Insight.
One way to close the gap is for the mobile industry to fulfill the health care sector’s safety, data security and reliability requirements, while delivering better performance, at a lower cost than legacy systems, Ryberg added.
“The health care industry is perfectly right to have a cautious attitude toward new innovations before they are thoroughly tested,” he said. “The first step toward a wireless revolution in home medical care needs to be to build confidence that the mobile network infrastructure is capable of even the most critical tasks.”
The study applied to the United States and Europe.
