Applying IoT to Improve Services in Healthcare Units: Case Study of Secure Remote Health Monitoring System

Abstract

AbstractHealthcare is the domain which has witnessed faster growth with integration with Internet of Things (IoT). The rationale behind this is that with IoT it is possible to keep track of physical and digital objects and integrate them seamlessly. IoT integration greatly improves quality of services being rendered in healthcare units. IoT integration also helps to achieve remote health monitoring as the technology with its body sensor network gets vital signs of patients from a remote place. Especially elderly people needs such remote health monitoring as they gain frequent medical issues. According to Azimi et al. the population of elderly people with age greater than 65 years is rapidly growing from 2015 to 2075. Sensors worn or embedded are capable of gathering rich health information. This will enable innovative research in healthcare landscape. Doctors now can view the patient’s (remote patient) health information on computer screen and provide real time healthcare services. Many healthcare integrations with IoT came into existence. However, there is lack of security and limitations in the implementation. In this paper, we proposed a remote health monitoring system with IoT integration. Besides this we also provided security algorithm for ensuring end to end secure communications. Sensor devices like DB1820 and DY-039 are used in the proposed implementation. Python data science platform is used for developing middleware and ThingSpeak is the IoT platform used for empirical study. The results revealed the proposed healthcare system is very useful to monitor elderly people or anyone who needs remote health monitoring.KeywordsInternet of Things (IoT)HealthcareRemote health monitoringIoT-healthcare integration