Abstract
Internet of things is a significant advancement in the big data era, which supports many real-time engineering applications through enhanced services. Generally, the next Internet revolution will be the interconnection between everyday existing objects in order to create a smart grid and intelligent environment. The future application of technology in health care will lead to the creation of an entirely new level of personalized, digital health care, where everyone is responsible for monitoring their own health and the quality of their own life. Further research is aimed at improving the existing sensors through increasing their capabilities and enhancing their efficiency. In the coming period, IoT is expected to play the key roles in all the aspects of modern medical treatment and health management - prevention, diagnosis, disease monitoring, treatment monitoring. This paper emphasizes the growing needs for better functioning of healthcare systems in real-time as well as the future development of personalized medicine.
TopBackground
The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to wireless networks between objects (things). ‘Things', i.e. objects, become entities with virtual properties which operate and communicate in smart spaces using intelligent interfaces.
Also, the “Internet of Things” is the general idea of things, especially everyday objects that are readable, recognizable, locatable, addressable, and controllable via the Internet - either via Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, telephonic data services, wide-area network, or other means (the US National Intelligence Council, 2009).
In their research paper, Atzori et al. (2010) state that the Internet of Things can be realized in three paradigms: internet-oriented (middleware), things-oriented (sensors) and semantic-oriented (knowledge).
Over the last 20 years, continuous changes in the healthcare domain have taken place, caused by the wide use of information and communication technologies in the medical field. IoT plays a significant role in the broad range of healthcare applications which could be grouped as follows (Atzori et al. (2010)):
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Tracking of Objects and People (Staff and Patients);
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Identification and Authentication of People;
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Automatic Data Collection and Sensing.
The rapid growth of IoT has resulted in a massive growth of data generated by these devices and sensors put on the Internet. The physical-cyber-social big data consist of these IoT data, complemented by the relevant Web-based and social data (Sheth, 2016).
The Internet of Things has been identified as one of the emerging technologies in the IT field. The market adoption of IoT has been forecast to take 5–10 years (Gubbi et al. (2013)).
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a platform and a new paradigm for interconnecting electronic devices i.e. global communication among millions of electronic devices connected to the internet.
Personalized healthcare systems deliver e-health services to fulfill the medical and assistive needs of the aging population. Internet of Things is a significant advancement in the Big Data era, which supports many real-time engineering applications through enhanced services. (Jagadeeswari et al. (2018), Khan et al. (2018)).
E-health in Serbia has been the subject of some studies. It was concluded that information and communication technologies are rarely implemented (Milenkovic et al. (2012)).
IoT is a vision which refers to the humanization of technology.
TopIot In Healthcare Domain
Medical sensors are devices that measure a number of physical, chemical, or biological parameters and then transmit or report these data. Some sensors are designed to work outside the body, and others are implanted in the body.
In the healthcare domain, the Internet of Things in its essence covers the following (Li et al. (2009)):
Key Terms in this Chapter
Telemedicine: A physical and psychological diagnosis and treatment at a distance, including telemonitoring of patients’ functions.
Health Informatics (Healthcare Information Systems): Software solutions for appointment scheduling, patients’ data management, work schedule management and other administrative tasks regarding health.
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN): A network that consists of spatially distributed autonomous sensors used to monitor physical or environmental conditions, and to forward their data jointly to the main location through the network.
Mobile Health (mHealth): A collection of mobile technologies as tools and platforms for health research and healthcare provision.
Healthcare Monitoring: The medical applications can be of two types: wearable and implanted. Wearable devices are used on the body surface of a human or just at a close proximity of the user. The implantable medical devices are those that are inserted into the human body.
Body-Area Network: A network that can collect information about an individual's health, fitness, and energy expenditure.
Sensor network: A network that consists of multiple detection stations called sensor nodes, each of which is small, lightweight, and portable.
Sensor Node: A node in a sensor network that is capable of performing some processing, gathering of sensory information and communicating with other nodes connected in the network. The main components of a sensor node are a microcontroller, transceiver, external memory, power source and one or more sensors.
Internet of Things (IoT): A new concept that has emerged thanks to the development of new technologies, especially the Internet Technologies and Wireless Sensor Networks that together enable the existence of the health system at the global level.