The adoption of health monitoring devices will nearly treble by 2020, exceeding 70 million worldwide, up from an estimated 26 million this year.
According to Juniper Research, the 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 “Big Data” collected by such monitoring devices presents a significant medium term opportunity for platforms like IBM Watson Health Cloud, offering greater insight into health information and enable more efficient decision making through data analytics.
Related to Big Data, we’ll see the expansion of genomics projects with companies such as Illumina, now mapping a large number of individuals’ genomes to provide access to unique sets of genomic information. This in turn will enable healthcare providers to offer personalized 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.
Another thing Juniper expects is heightened accuracy from the latest iteration of monitoring devices, which will lead to a fourfold increase in the number of individuals being monitored by 2020.
However, while the number of individuals using mHealth 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.