Turn on more accessible mode

Turn off more accessible mode

Skip Ribbon Commands

Skip to main content

Turn off Animations

Turn on Animations

Follow

Focus on Content

None

Internet of Things: Life and Health

Internet of Things Personal Lines Commercial Lines Life & Health Insurance Impacts For both Life and Health sectors, IoT and wearable biosensors offer the potential to provide more information offer better insights, improved efficacy and preferable outcomes of better health and longer life.
Underwriting Impacts: Wearable devices and the data they provide offer the potential for insurance companies to improve the underwriting of life and health insurance policies. The data provided enables more accurate assessment of client health via lifestyle choices and biometric assessment. The provides insurance companies with the ability to more accurately segment and price insurance products. A number of insurance companies have developed IoT supported policies. For example, a dental insurer provides policyholders with an IoT toothbrush and provides policy discounts based upon brushing frequency and duration. Life insurers are deploying mobile apps that connect to smartwatches and activity trackers. They then provide incentives to the policyholder for engaging in healthy activities. Agents will be able to offer more competitively priced options to prospects and clients, but may need to educate themselves on the new underwriting and pricing methods in order to adequately explain them to clients. Additionally, agents may need to actively seek out IoT enabled insurance products in order to provide options when savvy customers request options. Consumers will benefit by having incentive to positively impact their risk and thereby saving money and getting more favorable outcomes.	Claims Impacts: IoT will have positive impact on claims in both health and life policies. Early detection of symptoms will provide carriers with opportunities to mitigate or eliminate health crises, and rapid delivery of pertinent historical health information at time of loss will provide for better diagnosis and treatment. Case management will improve after events due to frequent monitoring of vital signs. One item which should not be overlooked would be for carrier applications to include connection points to health services providers. Although agents and brokers arent normally involved in the claims process in A&H, the additional information available and claims expense from biometric sensors will impact renewal negotiations and pricing. Consumers stand to benefit dramatically from IoT enabled life and health products. Gamification will encourage healthy behaviors which reduce adverse health issues and promote long life. Statistics indicate that employers can save three dollars for every dollar invested in biometric monitoring.
Example of IoT in Life Insurance The life insurance company underwrites prospect with standard mortality tables supplemented by data from prospects biosensor (activity tracker). After the policy is issued, the policyholder downloads the insurers mobile app and connects it to their activity tracker. The insurance company now tracks policyholder exercise and health data. Analytical tools run against individual and aggregated policyholders, identifying trends and anomalies. The resulting information allows the insurance company to make policyholder specific recommendations which are communicated back to the mobile app and ultimately to the sensor, changing goals and offering incentives for appropriate performance.