L. Fang
IBM,
United States
Keywords: medical device, Internet of Things, IoT, sensor, disease, healthcare
Summary:
Regardless of one’s living conditions and working environment, we are all surrounded by challenges. Unique solutions to these problems improve people’s lives. Three patents currently achieve this by integrating Internet of Things (IoT)-based devices into the medical screening and evaluation process. First, the Question Answer System Using Physical Distance Data patent describes a wearable computing device to record positional data for physical objects relative to the location of the individual at the time of recording. A set of answers can be generated for the question from a corpus of data and ranked based on the identified physical objects and physical distance between the individual and relevant physical objects. This solution will differentiate between, for example, the patient truly having carpal tunnel syndrome vs. temporary muscle fatigue. The system displays a ranked set of answers after searching and analyzing the symptoms described from the creditable centralized medical database. Unfortunately, people may not be aware of the medical conditions they have until it is too late. The Monitoring and Determining the Stage of Health of a User patent can help improve this situation. This system provides a vivid use case related to eating and swallowing (i.e., deglutition) by an individual with a medical condition. A set of sounds produced during eating and swallowing can be processed and analyzed to aid in diagnosing a state of health for some aspect of an individual. The method can transmit data on the determined state of health of the user and the corresponding level of urgency, with the notification including a determined state of health and the corresponding determined state of urgency associated with the monitored user. Third, the System and Method for Detection of Disease Breakouts patent was inspired by reading articles related to bovine TB, which has affected people’s health due to human and cattle sharing water sources in some rural areas. The invention is integrated with different types of sensor-based devices, such as motion/sound/color sensors. If a certain disease spreads, the invention system can assess the direction of the spread and monitor its progress. The system learns adaptively by acquiring human expertise to continuously avoid false alerts. An alert can be triggered once the abnormal pattern is identified. Additional interventions can control the disease breakout. Once the abnormal pattern is identified and linked to certain disease, then the system can be used to trigger individuals who use a mobile phone or similar device to record additional information, such as images and videos, on the current conditions of the animals or humans. The images and videos clips can be uploaded to the central data repositories for future reference. These inventions offer keen insight into medical conditions utilizing IoT and are unique solutions we have found to problems affecting everyone.