The advent of internet of things (IoT) and wearable technologies have created immense possibilities which are fundamentally altering the way healthcare services are provided. Lately, these advancements have garnered substantial attention due to their ability to support multiple healthcare scenarios. Wearables are a significant component of a healthcare IoT network which are embedded with sensing devices and analytical techniques that enable monitoring and evaluation of vital activities. Although applications of wearable technology and the IoT in healthcare have been reviewed extensively in literature, a healthcare application specific review is missing. Therefore, the chapter offers a comprehensive overview of the IoT healthcare applications and relevant wearable technology including the types of sensors used and data collected for different dimensions of healthcare. The chapter further examines the challenges hindering the adoption of IoT based healthcare devices and outlines the future research directions.
Top1.Introduction
As we move forward in the current century, healthcare industry is utilizing digital technologies to develop smart solutions aimed at expediting diagnosis and treatment of individuals. Smart healthcare employs digital technologies such as internet of things (IoT), wearable devices, cloud computing, fog computing, and 5G technology to browse through health biomarkers with ease, interconnect people, resources, and organizations, and respond to health requirements in an intelligent way (Muhammad, et al., 2021). The term “Internet of Things” (IoT) covers wide range of sensing nodes and technologies including sensors, Global Positioning System (GPS), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), infrared and wearable technologies which allow them to communicate with one another and services on the Internet to carry out various valuable tasks (Mehta et al., 2018). Wearables are a component of IoT network which can be worn by people for tracking their cardio activities and vital signs. These advancements have garnered substantial attention lately and can support multiple healthcare scenarios.
Wearable computing devices, fog and cloud computing technologies together constitute a three-tiered IoT healthcare architecture. The system architecture, shown in fig. 1, consists of three tiers: things tier where wearable sensors gather patient health data, fog tier which quickly analyzes the collected physiological data and cloud tier where data is examined in-depth and stored for long-term. A brief overview of three tiers is given below:
Things tier: The on-body sensors, actuators and co-ordinators constitute a Body Area Network (BAN), where a co-ordinator acts as a centralized administrator responsible for scheduling data from wearable devices. The wearable sensor nodes include sensor for capturing vital signs, micro-controller for local information processing, memory for temporary data storage, transceiver for transmitting captured data, power supply for providing power through batteries, signal conditioning for filtering sensed information to suitable digitalization level and analog to digital converter for generation of digital signal from analog. The functional tasks of wearables include sampling, data processing and communication of health vitals such as heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, electrocardiograms and body temperature and so on.
Fog tier: The fog devices act as intermediate nodes between sensor nodes and the cloud. Fog layer increases the overall service quality by lowering latency, energy consumption while also providing the required connectivity, security, and availability. A number of real-time e-health applications require fast response to patient’s medical abnormality or demand emergency alert generation. Fog devices that analyze real-time sensitive data near to the end-user instead of sending a large amount of data to the cloud can meet these needs (Mehta et al., 2023). In general, the fog layer interacts by using different protocols and has several interfaces for providing effective response.
Cloud tier: The cloud tier is responsible for processing and storage of patient health data. It consists of a network of interconnected servers and storage that is used to deliver medical services. This tier runs applications that use Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence to analyze data from things in order to generate relevant information for further decision-making. Such algorithms are capable of analyzing a large amount of raw data to predict and avert critical health irregularities. With such abilities, health care systems may not only assist patients with early diagnosis and continuous monitoring, but also lessen the cost of medical treatment and optimize healthcare facility procedures (Negash et al., 2018).
Several researchers have examined the feasibility of applying IoT and wearable technologies to different operational areas of health care. However, most studies focused on a limited range of applications. Thus, their application in various healthcare domains is not well documented. The objective of this paper is to combine plausible findings in this domain to create a comprehensive overview of the promising applications of IoT and wearable technology. Among the many dimensions of healthcare that are discussed in this paper are outbreak control, chronic disease management, maternal-neonatal care, pediatric care, elderly care, disability management, sedentary behavior management, athletic care, aquanaut care, and military personnel health management.