Internet of Things in Healthcare: Applications and Challenges

Background:Healthcare organizations have increasing tendency to deliver more effective, integrated, and interoperable services. Their purpose is to ubiquitous access the healthcare information and patient involvement in their health issues. The Internet of Things (IoT) can play a key role in achieving these goals. IoT means connecting any objects through internet or private network by equipping them with identified address, sensor, networking and processing capabilities. So, it includes the ubiquitous connectivity, anything is able to connect, and information exchange by internet or private network. The goal of this paper is to introduce the main application and challenges of IoT in healthcare.Material and Methods:To achieve the paper objectives, the more recently researches from IEEE Xplore, Science Direct, Springer and Google Scholar databases were reviewed. Also, Internet of Things , IoT , applications , opportunities , challenges and healthcare were used to identification of relevant researches.Results:IoT has been used to better management of drug supply chain; by adding RFID tags to medications, it can prevent the fake drugs distribution as well as reduce the high cost of drug maintenance and production. Also, RFID tag has been embedded into the medicine and provides the possibility of monitoring medicine regiments and health issues such as medication risks and losses which is important for drug companies and healthcare providers. The IoT integrated with cloud and mHealth technology has been used to patient monitoring, therapy and rehabilitation using tools like wearable or implantable devices, smartphone and etc. IoT facilitates the tele-monitoring of patients in tele-care by sending the patient information to her/his nurse, doctors, families and so forth. The information sent through this way can be used to personalized medicine purposes include personalized healthcare assistance and advisory, personal well-being applications, Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) for elderly people, first aid assistance for patients with chronic diseases as well as patient hospitalization for clinical care in the emergency situations and therapy . This application of IoT in mHealth and tele-monitoring can be more valuable for managing the chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disorder, hypertension and so forth. In other hand, the IoT applications in tele-monitoring and mHealth can be used to feed the CDSS and knowledge-based systems with real time and accurate data so it can improve the quality of decision making. The IoT can play a key role for gathering information to medical robots which can be useful by developing healthcare at smart hospitals and patients home. Another application of IoT is searching healthcare providers such as pediatricians by their location using GPS for requesting their advice. There are many challenges related to IoT in healthcare includes technology and standard issues, interoperability, Reliability, user engagement, data privacy and security, medical Big Data, ethical and legal issues for physicians and developers.Conclusion:Generally, the IoT platform in healthcare categorized as application based and service based. Service based platforms include AAL, internet of mHealth, adverse drug reactions, community healthcare, children health information, wearable advice access, semantic medical access, indirect emergency healthcare, embedded gateway configuration and embedded context prediction. The application based platform categorized as single condition and clustered condition. Single condition applications are specific for a particular disease like ECG monitoring, glucose level sensing, blood pressure monitoring, body temperature monitoring, oxygen saturation monitoring and etc. whereas the clustered condition applications are involved several disease such as rehabilitation system, medication management, wheelchair management, imminent healthcare, smartphone healthcare solution and so forth. The applications of IoT in healthcare are dynamic and more application will be add in future. As result IoT improves the quality of drug production, self-engagement of chronic disease, improve outcomes efficiency and effectiveness and cost reduction.

کلیدواژه ها:

Internet of Things ، healthcare ، CDSS ، personalized medicine ، RFID