Smart health @ home
Bringing health monitoring to the smart home
The increase in chronic diseases and health problems in our society makes people realize how important it is to know their health status and prevent possible diseases. Advances in machine learning, more advanced algorithms, and increasingly better technology makes it possible to keep better track of one's health and fitness levels, even at home. In the event of an illness, the desire to live a self-determined life, as well as the lack of suitable facilities in some regions, leads people to seek care or self-treatment at home. As a result, radar technology is increasingly finding its way into the smart home for health monitoring and care.
Smart home technologies can provide some simple services while collecting health data that can help people in need of care to reduce their dependence on healthcare providers and improve their quality of life at home. Health monitoring at home also helps to keep an eye on the state of health and, if necessary, to take countermeasures if health values deviate.
Next-generation sleep monitors with radar sensors
There is no doubt about how important good sleep is for physical and mental well-being. The quality of sleep affects how fit and efficient one is during the day. Sleep even affects the risk of developing lifestyle diseases such as obesity, depression and type2 diabetes. Unfortunately, many people struggle with intermittent or even regular sleep problems. Finding out the reason for this often proves difficult. Sleep monitoring can help here to measure the quality of sleep and gain valuable insights into individual sleep patterns. Radar solutions are a key enabler for the digitalization of medical healthcare in sleep improvement solutions like the solutions of Sleepiz or Tsingray.
Health monitoring with smart speaker
With smart speakers becoming the central control hubs of smart houses, new use cases enabled by a radar sensor allows OEMs to provide advanced, innovative features to differentiate their products in this highly competitive and rapidly growing market segment.
The amazing sensitivity of a radar sensor enables smart speakers to have new features for health monitoring. This is an exciting new area that address the growing awareness of the importance of health monitoring as can be seen by fitness trackers and the features built into smart watches such as exercise, sleep and heart monitoring. Thanks to a radar sensor’s sensitivity, which can even detect a pulse in a wrist, there are now many health monitoring opportunities that can be designed into a smart speaker with a radar sensor to add user value with hardly any impact on the system costs as these are all in software.
Examples are the use cases of fall detection, unobtrusive monitoring of elderly people who unexpectedly change their daily routines so that they can be checked in case of a problem, monitoring of respiration rate, irregularities in heart rate patterns as an early warning of a possible problem, and even coughing or snoring. All of which can be done automatically eliminating the problem when the elderly person forgets to wear the monitoring device.
Radar sensor solutions for more personalized, yet anonymous living experiences
If you’d like to learn more about radar sensors, listen to our #MakeIoTwork podcast episode with the radar expert Bernd Hettich and visit www.infineon.com/radar.
Supporting health & well-being: We make smart health appliances work
Infineon's semiconductor products and software solutions are the perfect match for smart health appliances as they meet the needs of digital healthcare devices. With our IoT portfolio including sensors, microcontroller, actuators, connectivity technologies and security solutionsw e support a health-conscious lifestyle by enabling smart devices that can help improve well-being and stay healthy longer. We make these devices reliable, convenient, personalized and secured. Discover how we make smart health appliances work.
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