No more driving to the doctor, sitting in the waiting room and taking precious time out of your day. Now it’s all done over connected machines.
Something is revolutionizing healthcare, and it’s known by a very simple name: M2M. But it’s a very powerful concept that is changing the way doctors and patients interact with one another.
Short for machine-to-machine, it represents machines connected to each other to share and deliver healthcare data. It can be done either wirelessly or over wired machines that allow clinicians to view images, write notes, monitor vital signs and talk to patients in real time, no matter where the doctor – or data – or the patients are.
It’s used in an industry whose revenue is predicted to increase to $1.9 billion globally by 2014, according to Bill Zujewski, executive vice president of product strategy and marketing, Axeda.
Axeda is a cloud platform provider for connected products and M2M applications.
Zujewski holds there are many ways to use M2M to help patients remain connected to their doctors remotely, including in-home dialysis, where patients no longer take their treatment data to their doctor on a thumb drive, but now have the information pulled automatically for the physician’s direct reception and analysis.
According to Zujewski, medical manufacturers were some of the earliest adopters of M2M technology, understandably due to the life-and-death nature of their equipment. Axeda serves more than 60 global medical device companies, helping them keep their devices up and running through advanced remote service and support capabilities, while giving them a platform to develop and deliver other customer applications at the same time.
Sometimes there are problems, admitted Zujewski, when companies underestimate the impact that M2M solutions have internally. Still others misunderstand the difference between connecting 10 vs. 10,000 products!
Delivering M2M solutions is an extremely complex process, according to Zujewski, and that’s where cloud computing comes in. M2M solutions “delivered from the cloud” allow companies to forget about physical servers or their IT departments to keep solutions operational. The cloud has taken over, providing an enabling infrastructure hosted exclusively over the Web.
Edited by
Braden Becker
