Singapore has made efforts to make its healthcare smart. This has become important in the face of an increasingly aging society where the health and well-being of senior citizens are a top priority. Smart technology such as home motion sensors or other detectors can help in this area. “We are trying to use the avail
Singapore has made efforts to make its healthcare smart. This has become important in the face of an increasingly aging society where the health and well-being of senior citizens are a top priority.
Smart technology such as home motion sensors or other detectors can help in this area. “We are trying to use the available technology especially for the old folks, so that we are able to monitor them better,” said Philip Leong, VP of APAC at BellaDati. “For example if someone slips and falls it triggers an alert, so the next-of-kin or emergency services would be notified.”
Another area in which smart health solutions can benefit is tele-medicine, which spares patients the need to go to a hospital for check-up or rehabilitation. “Over the last decade Singapore had been exploring all sorts of telemetric medical services and centralized database, all these technologies to eventually come together to better segregate and match the needed healthcare with the relevant services more efficiently, instead of a centralized hospital structure to handle everything. Similarly, big data are also being explored to provide more ready information into health trends and disease control,” said Patrick Lim, Director of Group Sales and Marketing at Ademco Security Group.
Telemedicine can help patients of various diseases. Stroke patients, for example, can recover in the comfort of their own homes as they do exercises and are monitored remotely by rehabilitation therapists. “Patient data processed by our smart AI technologies were shown to deliver more accurate judgement and prediction of recovery levels for stroke patients. Equipped with such information, nursing intervention could be targeted more efficiently, freeing up precious resources for other patients that need them more,” said Mervyn Cheah, Head of NEC Laboratories Singapore.
William Goh, Director of ADP Tech, cited another example. “For Tuberculosis patients, they need to work and at the same time need to collect their medicine daily or twice a day at the clinic. It can be rather taxing to do that,” he said. “Smart solutions can assist them by knowing when they have finished up their medicine and delivering more medicine to them at their homes.”
The use of robotics
In the healthcare sector, end users have also begun using robots too for various purposes, for example the dispensing of drugs in hospitals.
“Like all businesses in Singapore, the healthcare sector in Singapore is also facing labor crunch. Smart technology can assist in taking up manual task as such as porter services and free up staff in doing more important task,” said John Tan, Key Account Manager at ABB. “The Singapore Changi General Hospital utilizes a robot called HOSPI to deliver items such as medicine, medicine specimen and patients' case files within the hospital.”