Issues and challenges of user and data interaction in healthcare-related IoT

Abstract

PurposeThe Internet of Things (IoT), which enables smart objects to collect and exchange data, has a variety of application domains used in everyday life including healthcare. As a set of promising next-generation technologies in the healthcare domain, Healthcare-related Internet of Things (H-IoT) promises to facilitate better healthcare by offering data-driven insights. While effective in practice at large, emerging data concerns arise because of the inscrutable black-box systems. Inspired by the notion of human data interaction, this paper seeks to understand how people engage with the H-IoT data that is about and produced by themselves and to elucidate the main data issues and challenges involved in the development of H-IoT.Design/methodology/approachThis work conducted a comprehensive survey and integrated the method of content analysis by systematically review the recently published H-IoT research work in the healthcare domain.FindingsThis study thoroughly surveyed more than 300 research studies published in the last decades and classified seven H-IoT end-user groups, and three H-IoT data types that are important to H-IoT comprehension. Attention to human data interaction, our study also highlights several critical issues associated with this notion in the context of H-IoT.Originality/valueThis study will support H-IoT research by characterizing the data issues and challenges exist in the context of H-IoT user and data interaction. The findings will provide insights in designing for effective interactions with data in the H-IoT.