EXPLORING THE POTENTIAL OF INTERNET OF THINGS SYSTEMS IN HEATH CARE CONTEXT

Abstract

This paper is a survey about the uprising of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, their evolution, their variety of the application domains of the IoT systems, which includes, but not limits to healthcare domain, smart cities, smart objects, integration of smart sensors, smart home appliances control, etc. and all the technology revolution that this evolution implies and forces to happen. The IoT system's revolution and fast-phased evolution will create and/or cause positive effects in the whole society and technology, like in the case when the IoT domain is redesigning the applied modern healthcare systems, promising and later offering technological, economic, and social benefits. This paper also reviews the state-of-the-art network architectures/platforms employed in the IoT systems, presents different applications, and also the future trends. IoT security and privacy features, including security requirements will be also discussed and presented. Ambient intelligence, and wearables can be leveraged in the IoT healthcare context, sensors are also becoming ubiquitous and very important in everyday life and also generates data at an unprecedented, unseen rate and scale. This article focuses on the current/existing trends in the domain of IoT and on the current stage of development of research for hardware and software solutions, possible future communication capabilities between human beings and machines, and any new technologies that will employ IoT. Future researches on IoT-based systems are based on a set of open issues and challenges; also, there is the vital step from current "Big Data" to "Big Information" that can be improved and faster created with the help and implication of the current and future IoT systems/setups. With the proliferation of IoT, humans will be able to interact with machines/computers and also control a variety of networked electronic devices, including sensors and actuators. Also, the emergence and evolution of wearable Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMIs), employing directly Electroencephalographyc (EEG) signals, can be a key catalyser of this interaction and evolution of IoT. As smart home appliances, smart sensors, smart glasses and wearable EEG/EMG headsets and any other smart objects are appearing in our lives every day, all of them connected or being a member of the IoT systems, it is important to be able to foresee what is lying ahead of us, as a society in view of the fact that their number grows every day. As the gathered data is growing each day, the computation power from the available IoT devices and infrastructure are becoming more important and more utilized.