Internet of Things in Healthcare: An Extensive Review on Recent Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities

Wearable Devices In Health Monitoring

Information and communication technology (ICT) plays an important role in society nowadays. The impact of recent technology on improving the health and prosperity of people is remarkable, that converse about the digital revolution in the healthcare industry (Birkler and Dahl, 2014). The digital revolution provides an opportunity for individuals in taking care of their own health with the assistance of monitoring devices (Kostkova, 2015; Klonoff, 2013). These devices generate more and more data about individuals, transmit and analyze to monitor the individual health conditions through the technology, Internet of Things (IoT). IoT is defined as the network of physical objects connected through internet. It provides the possibility of continuous and close monitoring of individual healthcare using wearable devices (LeHong and Velosa, 2014). In recent years, wearable devices become popular among the academic and research community (Gao et al., 2016). Wearable devices are autonomous devices that can be mated with the human body for continuous monitoring of individual's activities (Gao et al., 2016). Now-a-days, wearable devices including eyeglasses, splints, bandages, and contact lenses are employed to provide medical functions like medical monitoring, rehabilitation assistance, and medical aid for long term (Barfield, 2015). The objective of this paper is to address the important most important wearable devices.

In today's fastest world, people spend their time in doing various tasks and fail to take care of their health and fitness. And also, a lot of time is needed for making an appointment with the doctor in a clinic. Therefore, people are finding alternative through devices that can be mated on the human body and provides continuous health monitoring of user (Xu et al., 2014). Wearable monitoring devices provide assistance for the treatment of diseases like heart diseases, diabetes, treatment and vital sign monitoring of heart rate, the oxygen level of blood, respiration, and body fat. Such device gathers and broadcast the information related to the person health condition through the wireless connection and provide an instant alert to the health care provider (Bowman and Schuck, 1995). Figure 1 represents the working principle of wearable sensor technology in healthcare and some of popular wearable devices with their characteristics are presented in table 1.