Consumers are generally comfortable tapping into information systems that remotely monitor and control their home electronics, heating and cooling, lighting, and alarm systems. These widely accepted technologies provide consumers with increased flexibility, confidence and autonomy by eliminating the need to tether them to a physical location in order to understand the disposition of the environment they are monitoring or controlling.

Soon, most everyday household appliances will be equipped to communicate via the Internet of Things (IoT). In many respects, the innovation in consumer electronics has paved the way for remote monitoring in health care. Remote monitoring is now widely used in patient care, maintenance and repair data acquisition of medical equipment, software upgrades for medical equipment and hospital facility control systems.

Now that the benefits of remote monitoring using the IoT are broadly acknowledged, the question is: what else can it improve? Here we explore various areas where remote monitoring has had a positive impact in health care and how those impacts influence outcomes.
Remote patient monitoring
Remote patient monitoring (RPM) allows a patient to use a mobile medical device to perform a routine test and instantly send the test data to a health care professional. Common applications include cardiac activity reporting and glucose monitoring. Additional areas like infertility treatment are also turning to RPM to save patients time and money.

In addition to convenience and cost savings, RPM can significantly improve an individual's quality of life. This is especially true for patients managing complex conditions such as chronic kidney disease, who may be receiving hemodialysis at home. One of the key features of RPM is that it can detect a change in a patient’s condition early on, so a trip to the emergency room or other acute care may be avoided. This early detection has also been shown to reduce the number and duration of hospitalizations.

RPM is also a boon for health care providers who can educate and communicate with stable patients remotely, thus freeing up more time for acute patients. This added efficiency, coupled with an industry-wide need for wireless mobility in health care, have greatly facilitated the adoption of RPM in both community and institutional settings.

Migrating technology: From manufacturing to hospitals
The more recent phenomenon of hospital equipment monitoring borrows from the manufacturing industry, which has been relying on remote monitoring capabilities to keep machines up and running for decades. Automating many of these activities via the IoT has saved that industry significant resources, including employee hours.

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