The new paradigm of the healthcare industry is proactive and preventive. The proliferation of consumer devices—smartphones, smartwatches, fit bits, and handheld devices— are changing the healthcare industry. One of the significant changes in the recent past is that many health parameters such as ECG, oxygen level, blood pressure, glucose readings etc., which were done only in labs, are now done anytime, anywhere on consumer wearables. These wearables have certainly become “on-demand mobile health labs”.
Fitness enthusiasts are the early adopters of these devices for various sports and physical workout activities. Since then, it has also started adoption in the healthcare industry. These consumer devices are creating a new value of preventive and proactive healthcare with the integration of these fitness and healthcare segments.
In addition to the above, the COVID-19 pandemic situation has forced a new kind of a touchless lifestyle. This has accelerated the adoption of remote technology in healthcare, personalized healthcare, safe health diagnosis, and treatment practices leading to the creation of a new market.
The above factors are contributing to the growth of a new market. Proactive and preventive healthcare is now available in the wrist and the palm of the individuals. These consumer devices are providing easy access to services, lower cost, remote management, and better productivity. Also, previously medical-grade devices are shifting toward non-medical-grade devices such as mobile phones, watches, and sensors closer/attached to the body. This market is still evolving, and the size is still not known clearly; there is a possibility of a significant percentage of the ~7 trillion-dollar healthcare market getting transformed by this new segment. The presence of big conglomerates such as Apple, Samsung, and niche new players in the market demonstrates the adoption and the increasing trend in the preventive healthcare segment.
Technological transformation
The smaller size of the products plays a very important role in this segment to further adoption of these technologies. Broadly, three areas are significantly impacting these devices— (1) The advances in the semiconductor industry; power-packed, intelligent small form factor chips are continuously transforming the devices to become smaller and more powerful; (2) The advancements in sensors to get various data points; (3) The IoT ecosystem which includes remote data collection; this connects the devices remotely and communicates with various applications and ecosystem players such as physicians and dieticians, etc.
These enablers are helping to get the data on a need basis to initiate the required actions, either critical incidents or routine preventive measures. This healthcare transformation is moving all of us toward a healthier society.
What we do at HCLTech
HCLTech is a pioneer in R&D services with 40+ years of experience. It is the No.1 engineering service provider in India. It provides services to leading chip manufacturers, healthcare diagnostic device manufacturers, and leading global consumer companies. This is a unique position of HCLTech cutting across many horizontal services and working across both healthcare and consumer companies. In addition to this, HCLTech is a dominant player in IoT technologies and is already providing integrated services from product design to implementation of IoT platforms in different verticals. With these unique capabilities, HCLTech is a catalyst to this holistic healthcare transformation.
