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Friday, March 21, 2025  
20 Ramadan 1446  

Elevating trend of mobile and wearable technology usage in health care sector


Innovations in Technology have revolutionized our life and people from all walks of life are being affected due to it. The same thing applies to the health care professionals because, now, clinician, nurses and others have started using mobile and wearable technology during patient treatment as they find it helpful in medication. Tablet, Smart Phone and Android are mobile devices used by health care professionals to access patient's medical record at any distance. Sometimes, they show medical images and X-ray to their patient by these devices.

Use of Mobile and wearable technology by health care professionals:
Several Mobile devices are being used by clinicians for different purpose, but mostly hand held computers are used for Time Management, health record maintenance, communication and consulting, reference and information gathering, and medical education. One of the most significant of mobile devices is maintaining records, dictate notes, store photograph, and organize material into the relevant category, while other usage is health record maintenance such as entering patient information regarding prescriptions, lab results, x-rays, scans, consultations, etc. As we know that health care setting is dispersed in IPD, OPD, Operation theatre and labs. So, health care professionals should be mobile to interact with people at different locations. Mobile devices satisfy their needs by communicating in various ways and simplify communication. Reference and Information gathering and patient management by getting evidence based information are some of the useful features which cannot be ignored.

Mobile Technology and its positive impact on healthcare:
A systematic review was conducted to know the impact of hand held technology such as PDA on physicians. According to research conducted with the title” The impact Of Mobile Handheld Technology on Hospital Physicians' Work Practice and Patient Case: A Systematic Review” which was conducted by Mirela Prgomet, Andrew Georgiau, Johanna that was published in a scholarly journal of informatics in health and bio-medicine. According to research, PDA has left a positive impact upon physicians in term of rapid response, error prevention and data management.

Keeping in view the positive influences of mobile technologies, Hospitals are rapidly adopting and adapting to it. The Monetefiore Medical Center is messaging and might use fitbit to watch over patients suffering from diabetics in. Similarly, University Hospital of Leicester NHS Trust has adopted mobile technology in order to reduce time spent and, thus, increasing more time on patient care.

Not only have Hospitals allowed the use of Mobile technology to their providers, but also looking for an opportunity to keep in touch with their patient. Adopting such technologies, Hospital will be able to reduce the cost of care and, probably, succeed in early diagnosis and prevention. Ongoing connection with the patient can help the hospital to be aware of his/her health and get consecutive insight into the prevailing condition. Thus, elevation in Patient and Hospital relations will get stronger giving the health care center a supremacy over their competitors.

Dark side of using Mobile Technology in Hospital:
Although, Mobile devices and wearable technology have several advantages regarding communication of information with patients, collaborating with clinicians along with inputting data during the visit In addition to this, Patient uses mobile devices to get prescription and making appointments, but it has dim side as well is security threat to information, for example, Malicious software programs, and spyware, loss of patient treatment record and mobile device portability means more chances of being lost or steal.

Measures to be taken to eliminate risk of using mobile technology:
Measures can be taken to enshroud dark side of using mobile devices at health care setting; Experts give a detailed list of steps to be taken to avoid data breach and data protection. According to experts, to avoid the risk of data theft or stolen, tokenization technology should be used, A technology that converts the sensitive information into unique symbol code. It is worth noting that the same technology is being used in credit cards. So, we can ensure more check on patient information by adopting data management policies while hospital employees may use personal devices to handle patient

Keeping in view, the expert’s suggestion to reduce the risk associated with using the mobile devices and wearable technology, we can provide much better services to patient and enhance employee performance and, thus, contribute to the welfare of people as whole.