Wearable Devices and IoT

Abstract

Wearable devices are the significant ubiquitous technology of the Internet of Things in day-to-day life. The efficient data processing in various devices such as smart clothes, smart wristwear and medical wearables along with consumer-oriented service of the IoT technology becomes inevitable in smart healthcare systems. The wearable market is currently dominated by health, safety, interaction, tracker, identity, fitness etc. Wearables increase the convergence of physical and digital world which automatically bring people into the IoT. The popularity of wearable devices is growing exponentially since it entirely changes the way how the consumers interact with the environment. 74% people believe that the wearable sensors assist them in interacting with the physical objects around them. Henceforth, one out of three smartphone users will wear minimum 5 wearables in 2020. Moreover, 60% believe that wearables in the next five years will be used not only to track health related information, although it can be used to control objects, unlock doors, authenticate identity and transactions. Wearables must be evolved to cope with the future to meet the expectations of consumers, where the users will wear many devices that is connected with the internet to interact with the physical surroundings and receive data in a seamless secure way. By 2021, smartwatches are estimated to be sold to nearly 81 million units which signifies 16% sales of total wearable device. According to the latest figure of Gartner report, the global shipment of wearable devices are anticipated to raise by 25.8% every year to $225 million (GBP 176.3 million) in 2019. Researchers also forecasted that the usage of wearable devices by the end users will increase to $42 billion (GBP 32.9 million) in 2019. In recent years, the IoT based Smart Healthcare system has influenced greatly on growing demand of wearable devices. In fact, the Wearable IoT (WIoT) devices are generating huge volume of personal health data. Enabling technologies such as cloud computing, Fog computing and Big Data play vital role in leveraging WIoT services. These enabling services over the voluminous health data enhance clinical process at health care system at remote or local servers. The traditional remote healthcare information system involves data transfer, signal processing mechanism and naive machine learning models deployed on remote server to process the medical data of patients. This technique has several demerits like they are not suitable for resource constrained wearable IoT devices. The resources such as processing, memory, energy, networking capability are limited in WIoT devices. Traditional mechanism lacks optimization of resource usage, prediction of medical condition, and dynamic assessment based on available information. Further, the naive machine learning techniques does not perform knowledge generation, decision making and discover hidden valuable patterns from the available medical data. The integrated platform in which cloud computing serves as backend computing systems, Fog computing as edge computing and Big data as platform for data analysis, knowledge generation promise to provide valid solution to several issues of Wearable IoT devices. Next, the health data generated through WIoT devices are personal and sensitive. Hence, the security and privacy of such delicate data at all level of WIoT ecosystem is essential. This part of chapter will contribute towards understanding the recent research work, issues, challenges, and opportunities in applying enabling technologies for WIoT. Also, how well the security and privacy can be incorporated is also discussed.