AT&T Working Toward Smart Hospitals, Healthcare with Machine to Machine Solutions

AT&T’s (News - Alert) machine to machine (M2M) solutions can be implemented in different areas, including fleet management, industrial machinery, retail, smart cities and healthcare. M2M can be a valuable tool in the healthcare industry, helping to improve medical devices, enable remote support and patient monitoring, keep hospitals connected to vital data and create smart mobile workstations. AT&T and Emerson (News - Alert) InterMetro, a provider of storage and transport products for food service, commercial products and healthcare industries, are working to create these workstations so caregivers can access treatment information and update patient medical records right from a patient’s bedside.

The connected mobile workstations will send updates and alerts when systems are in need of service and are enabled to receive software updates remotely when needed.

 “We are proud to be working with AT&T to mobilize and improve patient care with smart workstations,” said Rob Sobie, vice president, healthcare solutions at Emerson’s InterMetro business. “We expect these smart workstations can also help hospitals streamline workflow and reduce costs by moving vital information to where it is needed, when it is needed in the caregiving process.”

These mobile workstations are not the only way M2M technology can improve healthcare. Health and fitness wearable computing devices will be a main driver of the 90 million wearable devices that are expected to ship in 2014, according to ABI Research (News - Alert). AT&T provides devices, such as AT&T EverThere, that have embedded cellular and GPS capabilities. EverThere is a personal emergency response device that also features fall detection and hands-free communication capabilities to deliver 24/7 connection and protection.

The rise of wearable technology in healthcare requires reliable connections. AT&T provides a wireless connection that can be integrated with different devices or assets, and collects data from them. It also offers the AT&T mHealth Platform, which brings together mobility, cloud and security to connect people to health, wellness and clinical data from devices and applications.

“More and more healthcare devices will use M2M because of its ease of deployment and use — and M2M and the IoT offer freedom of being untethered. I look forward to connected wearable health and fitness devices wirelessly enabling a level of insight that will revolutionize healthcare as we know it,” said Alex Calle, director of mHealth Product Marketing at AT&T.