Berg Insight, the M2M/IoT market research provider, today released new findings on the mHealth market. The number of remotely monitored patients reached 45.6 million in 2020 as the market acceptance continues to grow in several key verticals.
This number includes all patients enrolled in mHealth care programs in which connected medical devices are used as a part of the care regimen. Connected medical devices used for various forms of personal health tracking are not included in this figure.
Berg Insight estimates that the number of remotely monitored patients will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.8 percent to reach 115.7 million by 2026.
The three main applications are monitoring of patients with sleep therapy devices, monitoring of patients with diabetes and monitoring of patients with implantable cardiac rhythm management (CRM) devices.
The number of remotely monitored sleep therapy patients amounted to 23.5 million in percent in 2020, mainly driven by ResMed and Philips that together dominate the sleep therapy market.
Glucose level monitoring has grown significantly in the last years and is now the second largest segment with 6.2 million connections at the end of the year. The growth is driven by the increased adoption of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) systems from providers such as Abbott and Dexcom.
The CRM market is led by companies such as Medtronic, Boston Scientific and Abbott that started to include connectivity in CRM solutions more than a decade ago. Other device categories include ECG, telehealth, medication compliance, blood pressure monitors and others.
“One of the most promising segments is medication compliance, which we expect will have the strongest growth in the next five years,” Samuel Andersson, IoT analyst at Berg Insight, said.
More than 50 percent of all connected medical monitoring devices rely on cellular connectivity today and has become the de-facto standard for most types of connected home medical monitoring devices.
The number of mHealth devices with integrated cellular connectivity reached 24.1 million in 2020. The use of BYOD connectivity will increase the most during the next six years, with a forecasted CAGR of 22.1 percent.
“BYOD involves low cost and the technology is mostly adopted in patient-centric therapeutic areas such as diabetes and asthma that have younger patient demographics compared to many other chronic diseases. Many of these patients prefer to use their own smartphone as the interface instead of carrying around a dedicated device for remote monitoring”, Andersson concluded.
