Health care service delivery based on the Internet of things: A systematic and comprehensive study

TLDR

The Internet of Things, a heterogeneous and distributed technology, has attracted attention for enabling low‑cost health services, efficient supervision, and public health monitoring, yet detailed reviews of its opportunities and challenges in healthcare remain scarce. This paper reviews IoT‑based health care services literature published up to 2018. The review synthesizes mechanisms reported in those studies, discussing their drawbacks, benefits, and challenges. The analysis highlights that IoT can improve government health services and commercial interactions, provides comparative insights for practitioners and academics, and identifies key challenges to guide future research.

Abstract

Summary Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes a heterogeneous and highly distributed structure which can respond to the daily needs of people and different organizations. With the fast development of IT‐based technologies such as IoT and cloud computing, low‐cost health services and their support, efficient supervision of the centralized management, and monitoring of public health can be realized. Therefore, there has been increasing attention in the integration of IoT and health care both in academic and the business world. However, while the health care service industry fully holds the welfares of information systems for its personnel and patients, there is a need for an improved understanding of the issues and opportunities related to IoT‐based health care systems. But, as far as we know, the detailed review and deep discussion in this field are very rare. Hence, in this paper, we presented a literature review on the IoT‐based health care services from papers published until 2018. Moreover, the drawbacks and benefits of the reviewed mechanisms have been discussed, and the main challenges of these mechanisms are highlighted for developing more efficient IoT techniques over health care services in the future. The results of this paper will be valuable for both practitioners and academicians, and it can provide visions into future research areas in this domain. By providing comparative information and analyzing the current developments in this area, this paper will directly support academics and working professionals for better knowing the progress in IoT mechanisms. As a general result, we found that IoT could help the governments to improve health services in society and commercial interactions.