BCN spoke to Jennifer Kent, Director of Research Quality and Product Development at Parks Associates, on the anticipated impact IoT will have on healthcare.

BCN: Can you give us a sense of how big an impact the Internet of Things could have on health in the coming years?

Jennifer Kent: Because the healthcare space has been slow to digitize records and processes, the IoT stands to disrupt healthcare to an even greater extent than will be experienced in other industries. Health systems are just now getting to a point where medical record digitization and electronic communication are resulting in organizational efficiencies.

The wave of new data that will result from the mass connection of medical and consumer health devices to the Internet, as part of the IoT, will give care providers real insight for the first time into patients’ behaviour outside of the office. Parks Associates estimates that the average consumer spends less than 1% of their time interacting with health care providers in care facilities. The rest of consumers’ lives are lived at home and on-the-go, engaging with their families, cooking and eating food, consuming entertainment, exercising, and managing their work lives – all of which impact their health status. The IoT can help care providers bridge the gap with their patients, and can potentially provide insight into the sources of motivation and types of care plans that are most effective for specific individuals.

Do you see IoT healthcare as an essentially self-enclosed ecosystem, or one that will touch consumer IoT?

IoT healthcare will absolutely touch consumer IoT, at least in healthcare markets where consumers have some responsibility for healthcare costs, or in markets that tie provider payments to patients’ actual health outcomes. In either scenario, the consumer is motivated to take a greater interest in their own self-care, driving up connected health device and application use. While user-generated data from consumer IoT devices will be less clinically accurate or reliable, this great flood of data still has the potential to result in better outcomes, and health industry players will have an interest in integrating that data with data produced via IoT healthcare sources.

Medical data is very well protected – and quite rightly – but how big a challenge is this to the development of effective medical IoT, which after all depends on the ability to effectively share information?

All healthcare markets must have clear regulations that govern health data protection, so that all players can ensure that their IoT programs are in compliance with those regulations. Care providers’ liability concerns, along with the investments in infrastructure that are necessary to protect such data, have created the opportunity for vendors to create solutions that take on the burden of regulatory compliance for their clients. Furthermore, application and device developers on the consumer IoT side that border very closely the medical IoT vertical can seek regulatory approval –even if not required – as a means of attaining premium brand status from consumers and differentiation from the may untested consumer-facing applications on market.

Finally, consumers can be motivated to permit their medical data be shared, for the right incentive. Parks Associates data show that no less than 40% of medical device users in the U.S. would share the data from their devices in order to identify and resolve device problems. About a third of medical devices users in the US would share data from their devices for a discount on health insurance premiums. Effective incentives will vary, depending on each market’s healthcare system, but care providers, device manufacturers, app developers, and others who come into contact with medical device data should investigate whether potential obstacles related to data protection could be circumvented by incentivizing device end-users to permit data sharing.

You’re going to be at Internet of Things World Europe (5 – 7 October 2015 Maritim proArte, Berlin). What are you looking forward to discussing there and learning about?

While connected devices have been around for decades, the concept of the Internet of Things – in which connected devices communicate in a meaningful way across silos – is at a very early and formative stage. Industry executives can learn much from their peers and from visionary thinkers at this stage, before winners and losers have been decided, business plans hardened, and innovation slowed. The conversations among attendees at events like Internet of Things World Europe can shape the future and practical implementation of the IoT. I look forward to learning how industry leaders are applying lessons learned from early initiatives across markets and solution types.

Philips is experimenting with using connected lights to for everything from keeping us abreast of important messages to making video games more interactive and impactful on our senses

When was the last time you thought about your lights? Whether you are outside or in, you will probably see 4, 5 or more sources of artificial light within view. There is an estimated 50 billion individual light points in the world today – seven or so per person; of all technology, the light bulb is arguably the most ubiquitous.

It is perhaps because of this ubiquity that light has all but disappeared from our conscious minds. We utilise it with minimal thought, though sometimes its complexities are impossible to ignore. If we were preparing a romantic dinner, for instance, we would tailor the lighting accordingly. We do this because lighting doesn’t merely reflect mood, but dictates it, something connectivity is increasingly enabling us to take advantage of.

“We’ve evolved for the last however many millions of years to expect light from the sun,” says George Yianni, head of technology at Philips Lighting Home Systems. “If there’s a bright, cool white light at midday from the sun, our brain is hardwired to be awake and alert. If there is a very warm dim light such as you get around sunset, our brain is hardwired to start winding down and relaxing.”

Yianni is a technological evangelist. In a very literal way he has seen the light, and he wants to harness this physiological sensitivity to light (among other responses) to help us to relax, to deal with jet lag, to concentrate better and much more. Due to the degree to which we take lighting for granted, however, it’s an area that poses obvious challenges to innovators:  “As a consumer, the only time you think about a light bulb inside your house is when one breaks and you have to try to find one that fits in the same socket and gives the same light output. But actually it is amazing how light can transform how a space looks, how you feel in a space.”

One of the first projects Yianni was involved in was the use of tunable white light in some German schools, giving teachers the ability to modify the lighting by changing the colour temperature, to calm students down, help them wake up, or enhance concentration (Yanni says their test scores improved significantly as a result). It was after working on a succession of such projects – including outdoor street lighting, office lighting, football stadiums, and more – that he accepted the challenge of introducing these kinds of effects and improvements into the home in the form of Philips Hue connected lighting for the home. “I wanted to make this kind of lighting accessible, understandable and impactful for normal people. I wanted people to think about lighting more than just when it’s broken.”

Some of the results and available use cases will be familiar to anyone with an eye open to contemporary commercial IoT. Lighting that knows when you’ve come home, for example, and can ensure that you don’t step into a dark, inhospitable house after a trip or long day at work. By the same token, remotely controllable or programmable lighting that can give people added peace of mind when they’re away – by making it look like they’re not.

Familiar as this latter use case might be, it also points towards another intriguing capacity of lighting. Usually, we turn lighting on and off according to whether we need it: but a house burglar may translate this as whether we are at home or out. Far from being oblivious to lighting, lighting speaks volumes to would-be burglars.

The potential of lighting to communicate in other, less nefarious contexts is something Phillips is encouraging its customers to exploit.

“We’re enabling people to use Philips Hue lights inside their homes and by extension the homes themselves to communicate simple notifications,” says Yianni. “So, in the morning, if the Philips Hue light in your porch is blue you know it’s going to rain that day, if it’s yellow you know it’s not so you can plan whether to bring a umbrella or not. Other customers are using Philips Hue lights to notify them about important email messages. There’s a wide range of way where people are actually using connected lighting in their homes to keep them informed in a less distracting way than an alarm or a buzzer.”

Another popular use case for smarter lighting concerns home entertainment. Whether we’re watching movies or TV, playing video games, or listening to music, Philips Hue is unique in that it can greatly enhance the experience through more than 300 third-party apps. Philips Hue launched the first video game, movies and TV shows with ‘scripted’ lighting programmed by the content creators to sync with their lights delivering a more immersive experience in the home. Yianni provides some examples: “As your health is dropping down in the video game Chariot, the Philips Hue lights turn red in your lounge. As a protagonist enters a dark cave in a movie, the Philips Hue lights will dim down.”

“For the last hundred years, people have been used to expecting nothing more on and off from a light bulb,” says Yianni. “We are changing that.”

In September Yianni will be appearing at Internet of Things World Europe in Berlin, where he’ll be using lighting to really illuminate the potential for IoT to revolutionise some of the most fundamental and taken-for-granted details of our day-to-day lives, as well as the central importance of communicating this to consumers.