IoT in healthcare ecosystem

ABSTRACT

In recent years, IoT has been revolutionizing the technology landscape, leading to explosive growth in fields like automated manufacturing, asset management, and wearable consumer healthcare products. IoT’s presence can be seen in all domains. Ever since IoT gained its entry into the medical field, there has been a magnificent transformation in the healthcare domain. Personal healthcare is now made a reality with IoT offering solutions in several dimensions like remote healthcare;smart clothing such as smartwatches, smart bands, and smart pants;and telemedicine like smart pills and personal care robots. This chapter gives a comprehensive walkthrough of IoT in the healthcare ecosystem, addressing the different applications of IoT in healthcare, the architecture models, challenges faced by IoT in healthcare, security practices and issues, and the future of IoT in the domain. In the first section, IoT applications in healthcare are discussed, which include patient-centric applications like remote health monitoring and critical care monitoring;and hospital-centric IoT applications such as the deployment of the staff, reducing charting times, and real-time location of medical equipment, subsequently followed by a discussion on how the data collected from the patient-centric and hospital-centric applications contribute to the ease of other domains like health insurance;and then, IoT’s support toward the pharmaceutical industry to restrict counterfeit medicine is discussed. Secondly, the implementation designs of healthcare IoT are discussed. Apart from the traditional cloud services, new offerings like fog and edge computing have seen a spike in recent years. Fog and edge computing are considered intelligent and flexible architectures. The subsequent section deals with architecture designs and the advantages and challenges of the two computing models. The next section demonstrates the actual implementation methodologies of the two applications in the following domains in detail (1) Heart disease prediction and (2) healthcare IoT-based affective state mining using deep convolutional neural networks. The following section discusses the challenges faced by IoT in the healthcare domain. In general, the challenges can be categorized into technological challenges;people-oriented challenges like the acceptance of IoT in the healthcare domain;and finally, security bottlenecks. The data generated and maintained by the IoT platforms serves as a gold mine for different healthcare professionals for future research and development in the medical field and the health insurance providers and pharmaceutical industries for their benefits. Hence, more emphasis is given to the security and privacy aspects of how the domain handles sensitive data of the patients. The next section provides insights into the security issues along with the cyber threats and attacks faced by healthcare IoT and the defensive mechanisms. Furthermore, this chapter deals with the IoT’s role in combatting the novel coronavirus that has caused an unprecedented global pandemic. Finally, the future of IoT is talked about. With the advent of 5G and an upsurge in artificial intelligence, the different dimensions of the IoT that are expected to see an outburst of growth are discussed. © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.