The internet of medical things and artificial intelligence: trends, challenges, and opportunities

Abstract

High quality and efficient medical service is one of the major factors defining living standards. Developed countries strive to make their healthcare systems as efficient and cost-effective as possible. Remote medical services are a promising approach to lower medical costs and, at the same time, accelerating diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Internet of things (IoT) has the power to connect several devices, users, databases, etc., in a unified manner. Internet of medical things (IoMT) is some type of IoT designed to facilitate medical services. Using IoMT, many of the medical tasks, such as chronic disease monitoring, disease diagnosis, etc., can be realized remotely, leading to lower healthcare costs and better services. This paper is devoted to the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in recent advances on IoMT. Hardware requirements and recent articles proposing solutions for IoMT using AI are reviewed. A comprehensive list of major benefits and challenges is presented as well. Wearable medical devices (WMDs) are also investigated. The WMDs classification is also performed based on their technology. Market share and its anticipated growth for different types of WMDs are also analyzed for the first time. Moreover, common applications of AI in IoMT are reviewed and then classified based on their usage. The paper is closed with the conclusion and possible directions for future works.