Internet of things in health: Requirements, issues, and gaps

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has been extensively applied to several sectors in the last years, ranging from industry to smart cities. In the health domain, IoT makes possible new scenarios of healthcare delivery as well as collecting and processing health data in real time from sensors in order to make informed decisions. However, this domain is complex and presents several technological challenges. Despite the extensive literature about this topic, the application of IoT in healthcare scarcely covers requirements of this sector.

A literature review from January 2010 to February 2021 was performed resulting in 12,108 articles. After filtering by title, abstract, and content, 86 were eligible and examined according to three requirement themes: data lifecycle; trust, security, and privacy; and human-related issues.

The analysis of the reviewed literature shows that most approaches consider IoT application in healthcare merely as in any other domain (industry, smart cities…), with no regard of the specific requirements of this domain.

Future efforts in this matter should be aligned with the specific requirements and needs of the health domain, so that exploiting the capabilities of the IoT paradigm may represent a meaningful step forward in the application of this technology in healthcare.