Wi-Fi infrastructure vendors such as Cisco, Aruba, and Motorola are all focused on the potential for Wi-Fi in healthcare, according to ABI Research’s new study ‘Wireless Technologies in Professional Healthcare.’
Wi-Fi has already been widely adopted across professional healthcare locations in North America.
However, the expansion of existing networks and the growing adoption of Wi-Fi in other regions around the world will ensure that the market for Wi-Fi access point hardware, software and services will grow to $1.34bn by 2016.
Principal analyst, wireless healthcare and M2M Jonathan Collins said ABI Research expects the number of smartphone and handheld computing devices leveraging professional healthcare Wi-Fi networks to grow by close to 20% in 2011.
Wi-Fi infrastructure vendors are set to benefit as customers not only build out their networks, but also turn to established vendors and their partners to deliver management for networks and the growing number of applications that will leverage that connectivity.
Existing Wi-Fi-based applications such as Voice over Wi-Fi and real-time location systems (RTLS) will increasingly be joined by a new generation of medical body area networks (MBANs), which are positioned to also leverage Wi-Fi connectivity through gateway devices that take advantage of Wi-Fi connectivity to support mobile monitoring capability.
ABI Research forecasts that the global MBAN market within professional healthcare will see nearly 30 million devices shipped annually by 2016.
