Security and Privacy of IoMT

Introduction

More than 50 years have passed since the internet was introduced to the world. It started out as a means to share information and resources among researchers in the government. Efforts to connect computers to create a network stemmed from the research and development in the United States, and also with collaborations involving France and the United Kingdom (Usg.edu, 2022). Since there were no physical network connections in the 1960s, communication and information sharing were accomplished using magnetic tapes, which were physically transported to the computers for researchers to share information with each other. Fast forward to the 1980s, when small networks like BITNET, MILNET, PhoneNet and many others had already been successfully constructed, researchers around the world had already begun working on integrating network protocols like file transfer and email transfer onto similarly small computer networks like CSNET. Moreover, historical events like the Cold War helped fast-track the development in communication technology, laser technology and transistor technology, which also resulted in the formation of the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) by the US Department of Defense (Computerhistory.org, 2022). The ARPANET eventually evolved into what is known by everyone today as the Internet by 1983. It is one of the most significant and important inventions of the century and also the cornerstone of the Third Industrial Revolution, or what is known as the Digital Revolution. The Digital Revolution also started the era of the Information Age along with other significant advancements in telecommunication and electronics, which in turn ushered the advancements in process automation using network communications and the internet. IoT and Artificial Intelligence are some of the cornerstones of the subsequent and currently running Fourth Industrial Revolution, which blurred the lines between the physical world and the digital world. A world almost completely ruled by the internet and the digitalization of processes. A fundamental shift that revolutionized the world for good.

Out of all the advancements in the current industrial revolution, IoT is one of the most trending topics and a hot topic of discussion among today’s youth, apart from artificial intelligence, big data and cyber security as well (Coe, 2022). Considering the unprecedented rate at which technologies are changing and developing, IoT in the meantime has managed to penetrate almost every sector of the industry and has effectively changed the way people live. It is not simply just a tool that connects devices with each other and creates a networked environment; it combines hardware and software to collect data and take actions based on that data on its own, creating a nearly autonomous system that makes use of sensors, internet, software programs and cloud to provide information to consumers in a user-friendly way (Sharma & Razdan, 2022). Human intervention is minimized a lot, although some of it would be required at the beginning while setting up these devices. IoT is also another such invention in the field of computer science that has the potential to provide a lot of job possibilities for IT aspirants and professionals. For example, the hardware used in IoT devices such as sensors, communication hardware, etc. for collecting data and converting the analog signals into digital signals, will create a lot of job opportunities in the field of microprocessors and embedded systems which are some of the major building blocks of IoT. The data collected by these sensors are accumulated on the local server of the user’s system or on the cloud, so this creates opportunities in the area of cloud computing, database management systems and big data management (Gillis, 2022). After all of this data is aggregated and digitized, it needs to be analyzed for extracting patterns and visualized in a way that users can understand it, so big data analytics will be required a lot during this phase. As it has been determined from the examples above that countless opportunities have been created in various fields from this single invention, this is exactly why it is one of the most popular topics in the 21^st century.

Figure 1.

Applications of IoT

The following are some of the many applications of IoT in various fields: