a market looking for credibility?

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On the sidelines of the publication of the annual report of the consulting firm PwC on health, presenting devices smart health connected to smartphones as part of the top 10 new health trends for 2016, reflection is asked on the challenges and global limits of this technology for the medical sector.

The Wall street journal is formal: in a previous article, he does not hesitate to qualify smart health connected technologies as vital for maintain, develop and above all improve our healthcare systems. Far from going through the revolution ofInternet 3.0, the field of health will be one of the most impacted by these innovations. But how ? If the entry of smart health connected objects into the medical sector makes sense given the enormous possibilities they have, can we really let technology progress at such a speed in a field as strategic as public health ? Because if they have a large audience of fervent defenders, smart health connected objects also find detractors. Abuse of personal data, marketing argument, or revolution?

smart health connected health: the big question mark

If smart health connected technologies know exponential growth, with the forecast of a hundred billion smart health connected objects who will be present in our environment from here 2050, only the medical field demonstrates such circumspection at the idea of ​​the advent of these new devices revolving around the concept of the Internet of Things.

While it is not difficult to understand why the assimilation of the health sector and that of smart health connected objects is the source of such a level of caution on the part of both professionals and individuals and consumers, the publication of White paper of the National Council of the College of Physicians of the 2015 edition provides a tangible source to rely on to establish the context in which smart health connected health is evolving today.

According to the report, the development of Information and Communication Technologies (TIC), first linked to the sporting field in order to control performance, for the benefit of the greatest number and their progressive medicalization are the result of a general tendency to self-management or "Quantified self".

The “quantified self” generically groups the tools, principles and methods allowing each of us to know ourselves better, to measure data relating to our body, our health, our general state or the objectives that we set for ourselves. let's fix ”. We can add that the main originality of this practice is due to its dimension of sharing, even comparison, between followers. – White Paper of the National Council of the Order of Physicians

Today, there is no doubt about the popularity of this trend. To see the impressive range of smart health connected objects highlighted for their management and support capabilities for our daily health, such as toothbrushes, scales and others smart equipment intended for seniors, we see the fierce and sudden struggle of tech companies to acquire the monopoly of a market that will soon fallow.

Cellscope Oto, the digital otoscope

But is this arms race in this new health market really beneficial for the consumer ? The flourishing of startups, the meteoric increase in products sold on the market and, remarkably, the impressive fundraising of certain companies highlight certain questions. about reliability and respect for ethics in a sector as strategic as health.

To establish an axis of reflection, the report quotes the European Commission Green Paper, which establishes that "This (mobile health) market is dominated by small structures: 30% of mobile app development companies are one-person businesses and 34.3% are small businesses (from 2 to 9 employees)". It is the same for the field of smart health connected objects, which, like that of mobile applications for health purposes, counts in its ranks a large majority of emerging and even embryonic companies, "Most often driven by the desire to stay ahead of the competition at the risk of offering products that are not completed and do not guarantee a sufficient level of security".

Through " insufficient security level", Here you have to hear the term security about the relevance of the medical service whatever it is rendered by a mobile application or a smart health smart health connected object in relation to the real situation of the consumer, and about the control of confidential data sent by the consumer. These two issues form the excitement of today's smart health connected health market.

Connected glasses interface

The objectives of market players today and tomorrow

The report therefore identifies, from these two issues, concrete threats which risk discrediting a developing market. These threats relate to:

• Protection of personal data, health data and confidentiality.

• The lack of clinical validation for a solution that would resemble a medical device, the deception on the purpose of an application.

• Malfunction of products and software, lack of reliability of sensors.

• Vulnerability, security flaws in products and software.

In an uplifting article, the American computer security company Symantec noted the astronomical amount of personal data from our smart health connected objects that is in an extremely precarious confidentiality protocol : the vast majority of smart health connected bracelets can for example be located everywhere via "Their Bluetooth chips and at least 20% of the mobile applications used with smart health connected objects would not encrypt their data correctly when they store it in the cloud. "

From 2013, the Financial times exhibits by the way, in an article from its September edition, that "9 out of the 20 most used health apps transmit data to one of the main companies collecting information on the use people make of mobile phones" according to the European Commission Green Paper. smart health connected health is at a turning point in the very foundation of its concept: will it play the game of data brokers, these data brokers whose activity is in full development, where will it have an exceptional restriction on because of its strategic nature?

It's today the main goal and the biggest challenge IoT companies whose activity is based on the production of objects related to the medical field: drawing outlines and intrinsic values ​​in terms of ethics and legal codes governing the use of these objects, at the risk of suffer from a total lack of credibility in the eyes of the consumer.

Because this is the major issue: the report highlights the lack of recognition of objects from the field of smart health connected health, but also that of smart health connected health home automation. While the first sector suffers from a "Apprehension which undoubtedly stems from the risk of loss of control over his data and his privacy", the second sector, which can also act as a cognitive controller for the elderly, for example, has an intelligence that "However, it has the defect of being too intrusive, and this undoubtedly explains why the concept has not yet broken through while many technologies are already available."

And this distrust is felt: always according to the report which quotes an IFOP survey from November 2013, “Only 11% of French people have adopted a smart health smart health connected object to monitoring their health: essentially a balance. Among these 11%, two-thirds regularly monitoring the data thus collected ”.

Miroculus interface

smart health connected health, a pillar of the emerging economy

However, “Health applications and smart health connected objects can be complementary tools useful for patient care. They can support and strengthen the patient / doctor relationship“, Relates the report.

If the ethical and legal aspect of smart health connected health is still debated, the economic aspect that it takes is the source of an opinion of professionals sharper on the issue. Eric Sebban, president of the company specialized in medical electronics Visiomed, persists and signs as well in The gallery that in Release : smart health connected health is the long-awaited revolution that will allow the French medical system to become lighter and moreover to become cheaper.

A French study has shown that health home monitoring of these patients, thanks to telehealth and medical devices such as the smart health connected blood pressure monitoring, saves several hundred hospital days per patient, per year, or hundreds of thousands of euros. Spend less and facilitate support, comfort of life and autonomy of the chronically ill, in particular those who live far from their health professionals: all actions on which smart health connected health could concretely reinforce our system public health. – Éric Sebban, president of Visiomed

The future of smart health connected health therefore rests on this principle of credibility. In addition to the actions of France and the CNIL, the National Commission for Information Technology and Liberties, which opened work in 2014 in the direction of a consensus on its regulation, the European Commission also launched in April 2014 actions on this dynamic via the publication of its Green book and on the opening of a public consultation: the purpose of which is to decide on security requirements for mobile health and of application performance, and health data security.

Manufacturers of smart health connected medical devices don't just provide answers to patients and healthcare professionals. Our response is also economical. For this, all actors, and in particular the public authorities, must give themselves the means, now put themselves around the table, and initiate the implementation of a real national policy to develop smart health connected health. It is necessary to move to an operational and large-scale deployment of these solutions, to go beyond the multiplication of punctual and scattered pilot projects, and to implement the 4 Rs (Regulation, Responsibility, Remuneration, Reimbursement). – Éric Sebban, president of Visiomed.

The answer therefore belongs on the one hand to the State which must on the one hand initiate a standardization process terminals associated with the smart health connected health field, and entrepreneurs who must also fix the current legislation of the medical sector to their products and services. Faced with this imperative, the president of Visiomed is aware of the arduous task that awaits the industrialists of the IoT, but remains confident:

Like any revolution, smart health connected health and telemedicine carry their share of hopes and fears. Big Data, quantified-self, artificial intelligence … So many technological advances that make fear of dehumanized medicine. (But) smart health connected health objects are not gadgets. They are one of the tangible solutions to make this revolution possible. smart health connected health must come to the bedside of our public health system. If 2015 was the year of sensors, in my opinion 2016 will be that of the long-awaited associated services. – Éric Sebban, president of Visiomed.

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