Opportunities and challenges of the Internet of Things for healthcare

Abstract

In the incoming world of Internet of Things (IoT) for healthcare, different distributed devices will gather, analyze and communicate real time medical information to open, private or hybrid clouds, making it possible to collect, store and analyze big data streams in several new forms, and activate context dependent alarms. This innovative data acquisition paradigm allows continuous and ubiquitous medical data access from any connected device over the Internet, and a novel health application ecosystem emerges. In these complex ecosystems could be insufficient to discuss only classical requirements regarding hardware issues and software support of individual elements. In the involved multidisciplinary development area, with intricate vertical and horizontal markets, it is essential a close collaboration between the corresponding stakeholders: endusers, application domain experts, hardware designers, software developers, market specialists, road mapping strategists and even the collaboration of visionaries to implement successful healthcare ecosystems. In this paper we describe some crucial systems engineering viewpoints to analyse the corresponding complex decision space. We complement the general examination of the IoT space by commenting some particular examples and specific details, which correspond to remarkable options of the involved dimensions.

An Improved Model for GUI Design of mHealth Context-Aware Applications

“…This eases the creation of context-aware solutions [14] as a consequence of gathering data from tracking patients and their contexts, and using it to offer recommendations based on well-grounded decision making [3,14]. Healthcare providers benefit from communities building in a similar way than patients.…”

“…The use of smartphones and devices connected to Internet has increased in recent years and it will keep increasing in the future [1][2][3]. This spread has given users the opportunity to change from software that worked in PC with wired Internet to software that works in mobile devices with wireless Internet.…”

“…Despite of these benefits, mobile devices still have several challenges to face in order to keep improving health processes [1,3,6,7]. One of the main issues that stops mobile technology from delivering more benefits is the small screen size of mobile devices [5,23].…”

Support Systems for Health Monitoring Using Internet-of-Things Driven Data Acquisition

“…The unprecedented growth in the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies makes it possible to talk about 50 billion connected devices through the internet by 2020 (Fernandez & Pallis, 2014). Among these devices are body-worn sensors that monitor personal health conditions.…”

Internet of Things Enabled In-Home Health Monitoring System Using Early Warning Score

“…The consequences of IoT technologies entering to medical and healthcare sectors are forming a new structured communication route between caregivers and patients [1]. In such systems, a set of connected wearable or implantable sensors continuously read patient's vital signs enabling caregivers to access the data through the Internet [2].…”