Evolving technologies: IoT and artificial intelligence for healthcare informatics

Abstract

Computational advancement like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) has marked their importance in a variety of domains, healthcare being one such domain. The one major need of involving such advancements in healthcare is the data explosion. The modern healthcare uses these technologies in different medical area; in medical diagnostics to detect chronic disease like cancer and tumors, automated real-time monitoring of patient using sensors, medical image analysis and processing using deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML), medical data analytics with the help of smart devices, treatment plan decision, development of medical equipment, drug discovery, robot-assisted surgeries, personalized healthcare, early disease detection, and many more. AI and IoT-enabled healthcare is currently at the niche stage and is evolving. The efficient usage of AI and IoT can change healthcare dynamics drastically in terms of decision making, predictive modelling, time consumption, and resource management. However, the inclusion of AI and IoT also tails its challenges like the accountability and trust of decisions made by AI, assurance of data quality which is transmitted through sensors, manpower for handling the AI- and IoT-enabled devices in healthcare environment, management of AI and IoT devices especially when linked with important medical equipment, consumption of energy and power by the devices that use sensor data, storage of data generated by the medical record, real-time management of the generated data, interpretation of data by machine, privacy, legal and security concerns of health records, human intervention, comfort of IoT devices for a patient and clinical staff and much more.With the current world scenario of pandemic and epidemics spreading around, it is of prime importance to dwell and see where these technological advancements stand in Healthcare Informatics and how they can be efficiently used for the futuristic healthcare sector. This chapter focuses on the proliferation of AI and IoT in various healthcare segments; clinical and non-clinical, along with the context of ML and DL and includes domains of healthcare benefit, AI and ML algorithms and techniques involved at various stages, use of IoT in healthcare, challenges faced, their limitations, and future scope.