ABSTRACT
The year 2020 witnessed a major shift in our society and the global economy due to the onset of COVID-19. Many newer trends are expected to surface as people grow more digitally savvy and embrace technology while working from home. This has also impacted the medical industry worldwide and has made healthcare preventive, predictive, and personalized. In healthcare, the Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of connected medical devices that can generate, collect, and store data as well as connect to a network, analyze data, and transmit data of various types such as medical images, physiological and vital body signatures, and genomics data. Real-time monitoring, improved diagnostics, robotic surgical interventions, and other medical IoT applications can all help improve outcomes in healthcare. Medical IoT refers to IoT devices and applications tailored to healthcare demands and environments. It includes sensors and apps for monitoring healthcare remotely, telemedicine consultation, and delivery. Medical IoT also uses AI and machine learning to assist life-transforming advancements in existent medical devices, such as the smart inhaler for asthma sufferers. IoT devices offer a lot of new opportunities for patient monitoring, both by the doctors and by the patients themselves. This is made possible by a variety of wearable IoT devices that promise an array of benefits but also pose challenges for all stakeholders in the healthcare industry. Medical IoT devices enable the collection of patient data in real-time, which is processed and evaluated thereafter. The information gathered is centralized for computing, processing, and storage. Centralization can be hazardous as it is vulnerable to multiple threats: failure at one point, mistrust, manipulation, tampering of data, and privacy evasion. Blockchain can address such critical issues by offering decentralized computation and storage for IoT data. COVID-19 brought out the benefits of technology and has reinforced the need to develop and secure more advanced applications including Medical IoT. We have advanced much, but there is a huge scope to explore, expand, and establish. © 2022 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.