70 million monitoring devices to be used by 2020

Health monitoring device adoption will treble to 70 million devices worldwide by 2020, according to a study by Juniper Research

Currently, an estimated 26 million devices are used worldwide but new research that features in Worldwide Digital Health: Developed and Emerging Market Opportunities 2016-2020, forecasts that the use of monitoring devices is set to witness a swift rise as new entrants gain Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval.

However, the study also highlights the need for new entrants to prove that their hardware is able to measure health indicators with the same accuracy as standard medical devices.

The research argues that greater consumer affinity with connected monitoring devices will in turn be accompanied by an upsurge in the adoption of mobile and cloud health platforms such as Apple Health and Google Fit.

Furthermore, it claims that the ‘Big Data’ collected by such monitoring devices presents a significant medium term opportunity for platforms such as IBM Watson Health Cloud.

The study also argued that with companies now mapping a large number of individuals’ genomes, healthcare providers will increasingly have access to unique sets of genomic information.

This will offer the potential for healthcare providers to offer personalised plans based on that individual’s genetic traits and susceptibility to diseases such as cancer, including treatments which have previously achieved positive results when delivered to patients with similar genomes, according to Juniper Research.

The research also displayed that heightened accuracy from the latest iteration of monitoring devices will lead to a fourfold increase in the number of individuals being monitored by 2020. Interoperability with personal smartphone devices will add further value for the patient.

Yet while the number of individuals using mHealth information services is expected to increase from 60 million this year to 150 million by 2020, growth is constrained by the lack of viable business models underpinning the operations in many developing markets, according to the study.

The whitepaper, Diagnosing Digital Health, is now available to download from the Juniper website together with further details of the full research.