Interoperable sensors and actuators for optimal networking
The newly founded Information Technology Society (ITG) within the VDE, the German Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies, expects that ‘user-oriented, secure, dynamic systems in the healthcare sector’ will in future use interoperable sensors and actuators on patients to capture and digitize data relating to such parameters as weight, blood pressure, temperature, activity and ECGs and then transfer them via the intranet or Internet. This will make it possible to record the progress of patients' well-being in different environments. The captured data will make it possible to create and deliver services via the intranet or Internet and provide recommendations for action, e.g. to do some exercise or take medication. They will also detect which measures helped improve the health condition. This would, for example, allow a service generated from the collected health data to assess the success of interventions on the basis of medical criteria (guidelines) and thereby provide the best possible therapy.

“Such services would use interoperable interfaces to connect the various manufacturer-independent components and devices to smart mobile devices. In the next stage, performance-assessment software would continuously analyze the progress of measures and improve the healthcare that is being provided,” explains Johannes Dehm, standardization expert for medical technology at the VDE. The digitized transformation of different types of data generated by different sensors and actuators would, in compliance with the telematics infrastructure (data security), allow these systems to inform all involved along the healthcare chain about important parameters – in almost real time. This scenario would permit many developments and products to be derived for the companies taking part in COMPAMED as exhibitors.
Every third person in Germany is already using a health app
Without a doubt, mobile applications that deliver health services through mobile communications devices are on the rise. Health apps are becoming more and more popular. There are around 100,000 apps alone in the narrower field of healthcare that are also being marketed increasingly by medical-technology companies. Almost half a million products are available through app stores, the number of downloads exceeded the three-billion mark in 2015 – a figure that has doubled in just two years. A survey by the Bertelsmann Foundation found that 30% of people in Germany have already installed health apps on their smartphones. The BVMed has found that they are used for improving health competence, providing analyses, gaining new awareness, getting new findings, for indirect interventions through the continuous recording and analysis of health-related information, on-line courses, the documentation of health and illness histories, the organization and management of processes as well as the purchase and delivery through on-line pharmacies.

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