138 — How Will the Internet of Things Enable Augmented Personalized Health?

In this paper, Sheth et al explore the future of personalized medicine in the context of a sensor-rich environment. The Internet of Things (IoT) age ushers in the ability to maintain a consistent record of an individual’s activity or health: FitBit trackers monitor movement and heart rate; other trackers monitor blood pressure, blood glucose, seizures, and more; users even manually enter calorie counts using systems like MyFitnessPal.

Though these metrics aren’t enough alone to diagnose a disease, they can be valuable assets when tracking the progression of a disease, or learning about hard-to-identify incidents like seizures: They are valuable augmentations to personalized healthcare. This paper intuitively dubs this cooperative system Augmented Personalized Healthcare (APH).

They explain that the key component in combining centralized healthcare in EMRs with this APH flavor of system is the interplay of these IOT devices’ APIs with the existing medical infrastructure that drives the industry today.