The global market for portable medical equipment products designed for therapy, diagnosis and testing will grow from $54.2 billion in 2015 to $65.7 billion in 2020, reflecting a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.9 percent, according to a new study from BCC Research.
The report, Portable Medical Electronic Products: Technologies and Global Markets, said that the U.S. market for portable medical equipment, which leads the global market, should hit approximately $20.5 billion and $25.4 billion in 2015 and 2020, respectively, with a five-year CAGR of 4.4 percent. Similarly, the European market will grow from nearly $15.2 billion in 2015 to nearly $18.6 billion in 2020, reflecting a five-year CAGR of 4.1 percent.
A key driver for the increased demand for portable medical equipment is increased demand for devices that can be used for remote patient monitoring and home healthcare, along with the requirement for devices in point-of-care diagnostics, according to the report. Diabetes and heart problems are much less expensive to monitor with portable devices, for example. Insulin pumps that can track, calculate and adjust blood sugar.
Also, rising demand for medical equipment from hospitals, practitioners and even patients has facilitated development of devices with more functionality and increased portability and miniaturization. Rising medical costs and patients’ desire to shorten their hospital stays has spurred efforts to miniaturize electronics across many sectors, including healthcare. Companies are exploring new technologies to improve the diagnostic, monitoring and therapeutic capabilities of next-generation devices while making them smaller, more portable and less invasive, the report says.
“To reduce design complexity, to reduce power consumption, to improve battery life to achieve faster response times, and to lower fabrication costs, the industry is pursuing increased component integration, with greater utilization of embedded systems, advanced mixed-signal devices, and systems-on-a-chip (SoCs),” BCC Research analyst Shalini Dewan noted. “Many of the latest devices incorporate flash memory, power management circuitry, a sensor interface, an analog-to-digital converter and an I/O interface. SoCs represent a further stage in miniaturization because these integrate a wider range of functions (digital, analog, mixed-signal and radio frequency) on a single chip substrate.”