The Challenge
From a human factors perspective, connected devices used for remote patient monitoring also hold substantial challenges. Among them, connecting the device to the Internet stands out not only as a hurdle for the patient but also a high risk of total loss of function.
Internet connectivity is typically essential for the connected medical device to report patient data to its cloud platform. Feedback, on the other hand, can be relayed back to the patient via mobile app.
Typical ways to ensure internet connectivity include using a chorded base station, cellular data connection, or Bluetooth pairing with the user’s phone. These methods are either prohibitively expensive to scale up or burdensome to set up.