Role of IoT, AI, and Big Data Analytics in Healthcare Industry

Abstract

The healthcare industry comprises hospitals, medical professionals, health insurance companies, rehabilitation facilities, pharmaceutical companies, and consumers (patients and their loved ones). The healthcare industry is one of the fastest-growing ones, due to the key driving factors such as development in medical procedures, advancements in the pharmaceutical industry, and a shift to a patient-centric model. Due to this advancement, along with technological development, processing of the massive amount of data related to patient records, medical resources (both internal and external), and research data is the need of the hour. The Internet of Things (IoT) is an ever-growing technological field that has the potential to connect devices from different fields via the internet. IoT, along with data analytics in healthcare applications, has seen tremendous growth, with technologies such as wearable devices, patient vitals monitoring, and logistics management. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data are playing vital roles in the healthcare industry along with other IoT-enabled technologies. Big Data is heavily interlinked with AI as it uses a lot of its algorithms, theories, and methods to process data. But AI in the healthcare industry has the potential to stand alone and fight diseases even without the need for human intervention. This chapter discusses the growth of IoT in the healthcare industry, advantages and drawbacks of conventional medical procedures, role of AI, Big Data machine learning (ML) in the smart healthcare system, cloud- and edge-based healthcare system, and challenges in implementation of IoT-based healthcare systems.