Internet of Things Based E-health Systems: Ideas, Expectations and Concerns

Abstract

Even the interaction between technology and healthcare has a long history, the embracing of e-health is slow because of limited infrastructural arrangements, capacity and political willingness. Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to usher in the biggest and fastest spread of technology in history, therefore together with e-health will completely modify person-to-person, human-to-machine and machine-to-machine (M2M) communications for the benefit of society in general. It is anticipated that the IoT-based e-health solutions will revolutionize the healthcare industry like nothing else before it. The rapid growth of IoT, Cloud computing and Big data, as well as the proliferation and widespread adoption of new technologies and miniature sensing device, have brought forth new opportunities to change the way patients and their healthcare providers manage health conditions, thus improving human health and well-being. The integration of IoT into the healthcare system brings numerous advantages, such as the availability and accessibility, the ability to provide a more “personalized” system, and high-quality cost-effective healthcare delivery. Still, the success of the IoT-based e-health systems will depend on barriers needed to overcome in order to achieve large-scale adoption of e-health applications. A large number of significant technological improvements in both hardware and software components are required to develop consistent, safe, effective, timely, flexible, patient-centered, power-efficient and ubiquitous healthcare systems. However, trust, privacy and security concerns, as well as regulation issues, identification, and semantic interoperability are pivotal in the widespread adoption of IoT and e-health together. Therefore, developing a climate of trust is one of the most important tasks that must be accomplished for successful e-health implementations. This chapter analyzes the ideas and impacts of IoT on the design of new e-health solutions and identifies the majority of challenges that determine successful IoT-based e-health system adoption.