Revenues from remote patient monitoring services that use mobile networks will rise to $1.9 billion globally by 2014, according to Juniper Research's recent report, "Mobile Healthcare Opportunities: Monitoring, Applications & mHealth Strategies 2010-2014." Juniper's prediction is not the first to tackle the question of the mobile health industry's opportunity in the next four years, but like the others it narrows the industry down to a specific set of services: In this case, remote patient monitoring.
Other research firms have announced their own predictions for various segments of mobile health, which we have compiled into this chart. When comparing to Juniper's, Parks Research has the most relevant statistics: The wireless home health market was about $304 million in 2009 and it looks to $4.4 billion by 2013, according to Parks. That is for the US market alone. Given that the home health market is largely a remote monitoring one, compare the Parks Research 2013 estimate for $4.4 billion in the US market alone to the new Juniper Research estimate of $1.9 billion for wireless remote monitoring revenues worldwide.
It appears that Parks is far, far more bullish than Juniper.
When Parks released its report findings last summer, lead analyst Harry Wang commented: “Wireless is an important crossover point for the healthcare sector and high-tech industry. Device and service connectivity is the model for future home care applications, and mobile networks will link a growing number of monitoring products to healthcare providers.”
Clearly, remote monitoring was top of mind.
Another firm that predicted revenues for wireless health was CSMG, which published its own assessment of the mobile health opportunity earlier this year. CSMG included a wide range of services for its definition of mobile health, including: monitoring, personal emergency response services (PERS), telemedicine, mobile medical equipment, mobile health information, RFID tracking and health/fitness software. By 2014, CSMG expects revenues for those services to top $4.6 billion in the U.S. While this report appears to have cast a wider net, CSMG's predictions are similar to those found in the Parks Research report. Albeit about one year behind: $4.6 billion by 2013 vs. $4.4 billion by 2014.
While it's fair to claim that comparing these reports is similar to comparing three different breeds of apples, we included two oranges in our graph above, too. A 2009 ON World research report predicted that by 2012 the wireless sensor market would top some $6 billion in revenue. This market includes wireless sensors for everything including healthcare, but healthcare is a key vertical if not the key vertical for the sensors market. Finally, ABI Research published a report last year that predicted WiFi-enabled healthcare devices and services in the US would top $5 billion in revenue by 2014. Given the WiFi network deployments in care facilities, much of that market would include home health services.
