More Than 7 Million Patients Use Remote Monitoring, Connected Devices as Part of Their Healthcare

Berg Insight, a global M2M/IoT (Internet of Things) market research provider, has released new findings about the mHealth market, estimating the number of remotely monitored patients grew by 44 percent to 7.1 million in 2016 as the market entered a growth phase fueled by rising market acceptance in several key verticals.

The estimate includes all patients enrolled in mHealth care programs in which connected medical devices are used as a part of the care regimen. Connected medical devices used for various forms of personal health tracking are not included in this figure. Berg Insight estimates the number of remotely monitored patients will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 47.9 percent to reach 50.2 million by 2021.

Connected medical devices accounted for 67.5 percent of total remote patient monitoring revenues last year. However, revenues for mHeath connectivity solutions, care delivery platforms, and mHealth programs are growing at a faster rate and will account for 51.3 percent of total revenues in 2021, up from just 32.5 percent in 2016.

The two main applications are monitoring of patients with sleep therapy devices and monitoring of patients with implantable cardiac rhythm management (CRM) devices. These two verticals accounted for 80 percent of all connected home medical monitoring systems in 2016. “The number of remotely monitored sleep therapy patients grew by 70 percent in 2016, mainly driven by Resmed that has made connected healthcare a cornerstone of its strategy” said Anders Frick, a senior analyst at Berg Insight.

Other leading vendors in this segment are Philips Respironics and SRETT. The CRM market is led by companies such as Medtronic plc, Boston Scientific Corp.,and St. Jude Medical Inc. (now Abbott) that included connectivity in CRM solutions more than a decade ago.

Telehealth is the third largest segment with 0.50 million connections at the end of last year. Leading telehealth hub vendors include Tunstall Healthcare, Honeywell, Cardiocom, Philips and Qualcomm Life.

All other device categories—including ECG, glucose level, medication adherence, and others—stood for less than 1 million connections together.

Berg Insight predicts that three of the fastest-growing market segments in the next five years will be glucose monitoring, air flow monitoring, and connected pharmaceuticals.

Cellular connectivity has already replaced PSTN and LAN as the de-facto standard communication technology for most types of connected home medical monitoring devices. The number of mHealth devices with integrated cellular connectivity increased from 3 million in 2015 to 4.9 million in 2016.

The use of BYOD connectivity will increase the most during the next five years, with a forecasted CAGR of 109 percent. BYOD involves low costs, but cannot be used to reliably connect every patient. The technology will be most useful for patient-centric engagement programs in therapeutic areas such as diabetes and asthma that have younger patient demographics compared to many other chronic diseases. In fact, many of these patients will prefer to use their own smartphone as the interface instead of carrying around a dedicated device for remote monitoring.

“Health-related apps and devices are generating potentially huge amounts of data. When the line between medical devices and health gadgets become blurred, traditional as well as startup companies try to position themselves as important stakeholders in the ecosystem for mHealth data,” Berg Insight said. “National PHR systems, device manufacturing companies, independent app producers and tech giants such as Google, Apple, Microsoft are some common options for data storage. One trend is to share data in third party clouds, exemplified by Glooko that allows people suffering from diabetes to download their glucose readings to their mobile devices.”

Berg Insight is a dedicated M2M/IoT market research firm based in Sweden. The company specializes in all major M2M/IoT verticals such as fleet management, car telematics, smart metering, smart homes, mHealth and industrial M2M since 2004.