Developments in technology have opened new doors for healthcare to improve the treatment methods and prevent illnesses as a proactive method. Internet of things (IoT) technologies have also improved the self-management of care and provided more useful data and decisions to doctors with data analytics. Unnecessary visits, utilizing better quality resources, and improving allocation and planning are main advantages of IoT in healthcare. Moreover, governments and private institutions have become a part of this new state-of-the-art development for decreasing costs and getting more benefits over the management of services. In this chapter, IoT technologies and applications are explained with some examples. Furthermore, deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI) usage in healthcare and their benefits are stated that artificial neural networks (ANN) can monitor, learn, and predict, and the overall health severity for preventing serious health loss can be estimated and prevented.
Top1. Introduction
The growing rate of the aging population has brought significant expense on healthcare systems requiring a long-time commitment of medical and human resources. Reliable, effective and smart healthcare service for the elderly and patients with chronic health conditions can be provided with the help of smart technologies. These new technologies can be used in improving physical and mental functions of patients. Real-time monitoring can help in preventing heart failure, management of diabetes, and controlling of asthma through smart medical devices connected to a smartphone application. Blood pressure, oxygen and blood sugar levels, weight etc. data can be collected by Internet of Things (IoT) device and this data can be transferred to authorized folks through connectivity protocols and embedding chips of a smart device.
Advancement in the state-of-the-art studies in IoT- based healthcare systems, adopting to the IoT technologies and smart medical service systems can increase the effectiveness in healthcare. Interoperability, machine-to-machine communication, information exchange, and data movement properties can make IoT an effective system in healthcare. Improved medical treatments with less expense can garner the attention of governments. Decreased waiting times, tracking of patients, staff, inventory, enhancing drug management by preventing drug allergies and availability of critical hardware can be accomplished with the help of IoT applications in healthcare. It has been found that there is a 50% reduction in a 30-day readmission rate with the help of remote patient monitoring for patients with heart conditions; making healthcare affordable for people. Furthermore, identification and authentication are used to reduce the possibility of anomalies such as wrong drug usage, dosage, timing or procedure etc. (Nasrullah, 2020).
Wearable monitoring systems such as Google Health provide the user with a complete report of combined health records, health conditions, and possible interactions between drugs and allergies. Some of the smart technologies widely used in the healthcare are as follows:
- •
MobiHealth: integrates wearable devices with portable devices such as mobile phones and watches
- •
AlarmNet: provides both the functions of physiological monitoring and location tracking (and)
- •
Mobile Electro Cardio Graph (ECG): measures ECG for users with a smart mobile phone acting as a base station
Tele-health provides health-related services where a patient can receive professional advice remotely. Stored images, video and audio can be transmitted to another location on an as needed basis. Furthermore, patients and doctors can interact over video conference and remote patient monitoring where diagnosing can be performed with sensed technologies and monitored data. Moreover, doctors for real-time tracking can give notifications about critical parts to patients or family members by mobile apps. Furthermore, remote training can be carried out with that system for patients with chronic illness. In addition, reports can be generated based on patient’s diagnosis. Doctors can be contacted in case patients are far away, and online support can be provided to patients until they reach a hospital (Nasrullah, 2020; Yin et al., 2016).
Integration of multiple devices and protocols can be a challenge of IoT in healthcare that there is not a connected device’s protocols. Lack of data protocols and standards and ambiguity of data ownership regulation can also be challenges for data security and privacy (Nasrullah, 2020). Varieties of devices have different communication protocols preventing the process of data collection. Handling a tremendous amount of data affecting the quality of decision-making is another extremely difficult situation for doctors as more devices connect internet platforms. Vital healthcare analytics can help quicker decision making with higher precision. Resource-based data accessing method, namely UDA-IoT, has been developed to acquire and process IoT data ubiquitously and has shown great effectiveness in a cloud and mobile computing platform, from which doctors and managers will both benefit (Yin et al., 2016). Hacking of healthcare data is also a problem in the field of cyber-crime that cyber-criminals can use patients’ data to write prescriptions and buy medical equipment without patient’s consent (Nasrullah, 2020).