By Erin McPike for CNN • Updated 14th June 2017
When the world was suddenly struck by a pandemic of H1N1 flu in 2009, one thing became clear: even with all the advice, vaccines and antivirals around, you can never predict how much your family’s individual immune systems will adapt to a new infection.
Taking preventive measures can help, though, and with the emergence of so-called “viral cyborgs” who have sensors embedded in their skin and other parts of their bodies, doctors have a number of new possibilities for protecting their patients — and themselves.
Just as cell phones allow health professionals to put their resources and time to good use in the event of an infection, medical devices for those devices can be setup to send emails or texts to the patient when they’re showing symptoms or have been involved in an accident.
Another type of gadget meant to alert health care professionals to alerts and prompt them to act: The Internet of Things (IoT).
“You are now increasingly connected to systems that can monitor your general health at a very fine level. This is expanding our opportunities for different forms of wellness monitoring to provide self-tracking for monitoring,” says Jonathan King, director of the Human Sciences Institute at The University of Auckland and head of The Digital Health Institute .
According to research published in January 2017 in the journal BMC Medical Informatics, over 80% of patients in remote and rural areas receive healthcare from a doctor on a daily basis.
This gives an opportunity for such practices to be employed as preventive measures in such areas, says King.
Out with the phones and in with the devices
It’s already happening in Japan: Since 2014, doctors in six hospitals in Kyoto have been using a wearable blood pressure monitoring system on patients who are involved in workplace accidents to help save lives, among other things.
At Yokohama City Hospital, doctors have used an IoT radiation-detection device that can detect health problems, such as cancer, under ultrasound-like videos to fight the spread of the H1N1 pandemic.
Aside from providing a very effective test of the patient’s health, the footage can then be used for comparison purposes.
Other devices that help health care professionals monitor their patients more effectively include audio and visual sensors embedded into their skin, created by medical design student P.C. Symond and patented by Cornell University.
The devices alert a doctor when a patient’s temperature gets too high or their heart rate goes up, and can be used by patients in yoga classes, physical therapy sessions and even the workplace — helping protect against diseases such as cardiovascular disease and even diabetes.
In the meantime, doctors are still adapting their services as best they can to the IoT.
“We have to get the expectation of what these devices are that have these sensors embedded into them to match what we need to do. We have to be very strategic about how we deploy them because the information that comes back out of them is very valuable in terms of making those decisions,” says King.
“Obviously, if you’re a blood pressure reader in a busy hospital on a regular basis you will want to work with these systems to do the utmost in the best way possible.”