The Internet of Things for Health Care: A Comprehensive Survey

TLDR

The Internet of Things enables smart objects to form the core of cyber‑physical systems, and its diverse applications—especially in health care—are reshaping modern medicine with promising technological, economic, and social benefits. This survey examines current IoT‑based health care technologies, evaluates network architectures, applications, and industry trends, and proposes a collaborative security model while outlining future research directions. The authors analyze IoT security and privacy requirements, threat models, and attack taxonomies, propose a collaborative security framework, and evaluate how big data, ambient intelligence, wearables, and global policies can be leveraged in health care.

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) makes smart objects the ultimate building blocks in the development of cyber-physical smart pervasive frameworks. The IoT has a variety of application domains, including health care. The IoT revolution is redesigning modern health care with promising technological, economic, and social prospects. This paper surveys advances in IoT-based health care technologies and reviews the state-of-the-art network architectures/platforms, applications, and industrial trends in IoT-based health care solutions. In addition, this paper analyzes distinct IoT security and privacy features, including security requirements, threat models, and attack taxonomies from the health care perspective. Further, this paper proposes an intelligent collaborative security model to minimize security risk; discusses how different innovations such as big data, ambient intelligence, and wearables can be leveraged in a health care context; addresses various IoT and eHealth policies and regulations across the world to determine how they can facilitate economies and societies in terms of sustainable development; and provides some avenues for future research on IoT-based health care based on a set of open issues and challenges.