Application of internet of things in healthcare domain

Internet of things (IoT) enables machine-to-machine, human-to-human and machine-to-human interaction. Recent advancement in IoT systems has positively impacted the daily activities of humans, from accessing information to the delivery of service in real-time. This has improved healthcare management and services, especially in medical hospitals, for effective and timely access to diagnostic information and treatment of patients. Several existing research mainly focused on the design of IoT architecture, its challenges, and benefits to human society with minor or without considering applying IoT in the healthcare domain. To bridge this gap, this study investigates the implications of IoT integration in the healthcare management domain. It presents a detailed discussion on IoT utilization to improve the functionalities of hospital management system. It also discusses some potential emerging innovations that aids the development and application of IoT in hospital management systems. Investigations show that healthcare personnel can administer treatments to patients anytime–anywhere. Patients, especially the elderly are administered treatment, as well as monitoring their wellbeing while at home with the support of wearable sensor devices. Also, some of the challenges that impedes the integration of IoT application into healthcare domain includes generation of irrelevant huge amount of data, issues of security and privacy of patient information and high cost of IoT adoption. Furthermore, the future research trends in adoption of IoT to improve healthcare domain includes stroke and epileptic seizure predictions and prosthetic sensors which is used to retrieve relevant data or information to aid the treatment of a patient in real-time.