How WiFi 7 Will Transform Healthcare

Sean Lorenz for Mouser Electronics

(Source: Tex vector- stock.adobe.com)

Having spent the past fifteen years working at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and digital health, I’ve seen many innovations and companies come to the forefront. For example, companies building IoT protocols, stitching together IoT devices in the home to deliver better healthcare, and using connected devices to push more remote patient monitoring have all helped shape new applications of these technologies. Across this continuum of different devices, data is sent back to a clinician or a pharmaceutical company for analysis, results are extracted, and diagnoses made. Having the ability to derive insights from the immense volume of data produced by these devices is a huge challenge, however. Another challenge is having the level of connectivity required to power those systems and transmit information. This is where WiFi 7 comes into the picture.

Current State of Digital Healthcare

In the past five to ten years, many hospitals have updated to more modern Wi-Fi® standards. Moreover, many healthcare systems have reversed their approach to cloud acceptance. Many Chief Information Officers (CIOs) were opposed to cloud computing initially due to concerns about security. However, now that they’ve accepted cloud computing, integration with external vendors and data partners has become much easier. This transition has opened the door to new data aggregation and processing possibilities within healthcare networks while also creating a new concern: what should they do with all that data? This challenge isn’t an issue of connectivity; it concerns how to use data effectively and deliver value to clinicians. Making data faster isn’t going to solve the problem, especially for a clinician who is already struggling with alert fatigue. We need to decide how best to use data before Wi-Fi 7 can have a positive impact.

Integrating consumer devices such as pulse oximeters or heart rate alerts on devices like Apple Watches is another issue. When people notice unusual results, no direct connection is made with their doctor—that process is manual. Nothing connects those devices to a patient portal, aggregates the data, and collates everything together to make a decision. I’d love to see the day when devices are integrated with value-based care and data are factored into electronic health records, sending alerts to clinicians when necessary. Nevertheless, even with the imminent arrival of Wi-Fi 7, I don’t think we’re quite there yet. Once these AI-based systems are in place, technological advances like WiFi 7 will be fundamental to enabling them for optimal use.

Advantages of WiFi 7 for the Healthcare Industry

Lower latency is, without a doubt, the biggest advantage of WiFi 7 in healthcare settings. The ability to transfer data in critical situations and access decision-making data faster in emergency settings might be the difference between life and death. However, medical device manufacturers often don’t like transmitting data from their own devices, and as such, the speed of the connection doesn’t matter if they won’t allow an application programming interface to transmit the data. Of course, this is yet another issue where future integration will be key to optimization.

WiFi 7 could also be incredibly advantageous to hard-to-reach communities. Access is one of the biggest problems when it comes to connectivity in the home. Unfortunately, those most in need are often from rural areas, live in impoverished communities, or are elderly. While these populations might benefit the most from remote patient monitoring, they often don’t have adequate connectivity. While collecting and transmitting data from a medical device is already possible, moving the data back and forth quickly enough is not possible at the moment. Having higher data rates and lower latency can help users get the most out of the bandwidth available to them and consequently enable telehealth connections to doctors for these communities.

Healthcare Innovations Supported by WiFi 7

One of the most significant developments that WiFi 7 will support is healthcare IoT—a collection of consumer health devices integrated with FDA-approved medical devices and applications that connect to healthcare systems via a manufacturer’s cloud service. Healthcare IoT includes devices for different environments: in-home devices, such as remote patient monitoring; wearable devices, such as smartwatches; mobile devices, such as smartphones; public devices, such as point-of-care kiosks; and in-hospital devices, covering everything from infusion pumps to radio-frequency identification tags to track medical equipment. All of these medical devices are equipped with Wi-Fi; the improved speed of WiFi 7 will vastly improve machine-to-machine communication, thereby enabling linking to cloud platforms where data can be stored and analyzed. And, as previously mentioned, this is especially vital in emergency departments. Magnetic resonance imaging, ultrasounds, and image acquisition systems increasingly have larger and larger files, making the ability to quickly process and streamline the flow of image data to AI systems a critical development.

Of course, challenges need to be addressed, such as determining what devices should be combined to create an AI pipeline that leads to a beneficial output for clinicians and, indeed, their patients. At this moment, the onus is more on solving that problem than actually getting the data. However, once that piece of work is done, WiFi 7 will enable us to connect devices that stream such high-frequency data, which we weren’t even thinking about before.

Furthermore, WiFi 7 will enable the fusion of AI and robotics. Real-time streaming during surgery is extremely critical. Ultimately, the more data we transmit through the network and the faster it's transferred during surgery, the better. Augmented reality and virtual reality applications also exist, and while I haven’t seen huge value so far, their use in treating mental health conditions shows promise. However, in my opinion, AI diagnostics is the biggest winner: WiFi 7’s ability to transmit data faster is going to unleash so many more diagnostic capabilities. Once approved, the AI algorithms that are based on clinical studies or seeking US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance will jump from offline data to real clinical settings. WiFi 7 will allow many devices that couldn’t previously process all that data to be used in real-world clinical settings.

Digital Healthcare for the Future

While much skepticism existed in the past around machine learning algorithms, newer deep learning-based systems trained on large datasets are becoming incredibly accurate. We’ve unlocked the world of software as a medical device, and many FDA-cleared AI algorithms are showing really promising results. These AI systems have high accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity, enabling them to help doctors reduce their workload, be more efficient, and offer better care.

The biggest barriers to all these advancements will be clinicians and cost. Healthcare systems are inundated with new technologies; digital health devices or software can create significant noise. Clinicians really need solutions that increase efficiency and reduce the cost of care. Fortunately, many of the AI startups developing point solutions are beginning to partner with larger organizations to enable them to run through their networks. This allows solutions to be tested in a few locations and then expanded quickly. This process is moving much faster, albeit inherently slowed by the complications of putting an AI algorithm into a normal clinical workflow.

As an alternative to a traditional doctor’s office where they look at your entire digital fingerprint, the new digital clinics that are starting to emerge will be really interesting. Digital clinics are able to stitch all these different devices together and provide a more data-driven approach to primary care. I think these places will become more popular and will enable more preventative care, especially once health-tracking devices in the home transmit seamlessly across advanced Wi-Fi connections. The ability to push data back and forth faster in these alternative models is vital to advancing the quality of healthcare. Of course, these kinds of services aren’t paid for through normal healthcare—early adopters must resolve the kinks before these solutions are ready for the general population as part of a holistic system. But these solutions offer huge potential in terms of preventative care to reduce emergency room visits and hospitalizations.

Conclusion

WiFi 7 offers great promise in extending the level of connectivity needed to power systems to transmit large volumes of health data between devices and clinicians. As challenges continue to be resolved, the data-driven approach facilitated by this technology could improve patient care significantly. However, these advancements must be combined with the human touch. I truly believe that human interaction is critical and shouldn’t be removed from healthcare systems, especially as we age. Human contact is vital regardless of how fast our digital connectivity is.