Biomedical IoT: Enabling Technologies, Architectural Elements, Challenges, and Future Directions

Wireless Battery-free and Fully Implantable Organ Interfaces

Advances in soft materials, miniaturized electronics, sensors, stimulators, radios, and battery-free power supplies are resulting in a new generation of fully implantable organ interfaces that leverage volumetric reduction and soft mechanics by eliminating electrochemical power storage. This device class offers the ability to provide high-fidelity readouts of physiological processes, enables stimulation, and allows control over organs to realize new therapeutic and diagnostic paradigms. Driven by seamless integration with connected infrastructure, these devices enable personalized digital medicine. Key to advances are carefully designed material, electrophysical, electrochemical, and electromagnetic systems that form implantables with mechanical properties closely matched to the target organ to deliver functionality that supports high-fidelity sensors and stimulators. The elimination of electrochemical power supplies enables control over device operation, anywhere from acute, to lifetimes matching the target subject with physical dimensions that supports imperceptible operation. This review provides a comprehensive overview of the basic building blocks of battery-free organ interfaces and related topics such as implantation, delivery, sterilization, and user acceptance. State of the art examples categorized by organ system and an outlook of interconnection and advanced strategies for computation leveraging the consistent power influx to elevate functionality of this device class over current battery-powered strategies is highlighted.

Healthcare analytics-A literature review and proposed research agenda

This research addresses the demanding need for research in healthcare analytics, by explaining how previous studies have used big data, AI, and machine learning to identify, address, or solve healthcare problems. Healthcare science methods are combined with contemporary data science techniques to examine the literature, identify research gaps, and propose a research agenda for researchers, academic institutions, and governmental healthcare organizations. The study contributes to the body of literature by providing a state-of-the-art review of healthcare analytics as well as proposing a research agenda to advance the knowledge in this area. The results of this research can be beneficial for both healthcare science and data science researchers as well as practitioners in the field.

Wearable Technologies and AI at the Far Edge for Chronic Heart Failure Prevention and Management: A Systematic Review and Prospects

Smart wearable devices enable personalized at-home healthcare by unobtrusively collecting patient health data and facilitating the development of intelligent platforms to support patient care and management. The accurate analysis of data obtained from wearable devices is crucial for interpreting and contextualizing health data and facilitating the reliable diagnosis and management of critical and chronic diseases. The combination of edge computing and artificial intelligence has provided real-time, time-critical, and privacy-preserving data analysis solutions. However, based on the envisioned service, evaluating the additive value of edge intelligence to the overall architecture is essential before implementation. This article aims to comprehensively analyze the current state of the art on smart health infrastructures implementing wearable and AI technologies at the far edge to support patients with chronic heart failure (CHF). In particular, we highlight the contribution of edge intelligence in supporting the integration of wearable devices into IoT-aware technology infrastructures that provide services for patient diagnosis and management. We also offer an in-depth analysis of open challenges and provide potential solutions to facilitate the integration of wearable devices with edge AI solutions to provide innovative technological infrastructures and interactive services for patients and doctors.

Intelligent Healthcare: Integration of Emerging Technologies and Internet of Things for Humanity

Health is gold, and good health is a matter of survival for humanity. The development of the healthcare industry aligns with the development of humans throughout history. Nowadays, along with the strong growth of science and technology, the medical domain in general and the healthcare industry have achieved many breakthroughs, such as remote medical examination and treatment applications, pandemic prediction, and remote patient health monitoring. The advent of 5th generation communication networks in the early 2020s led to the Internet of Things concept. Moreover, the 6th generation communication networks (so-called 6G) expected to launch in 2030 will be the next revolution of the IoT era, and will include autonomous IoT systems and form a series of endogenous intelligent applications that serve humanity. One of the domains that receives the most attention is smart healthcare. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive survey of IoT-based technologies and solutions in the medical field. Then, we propose an all-in-one computing architecture for real-time IoHT applications and present possible solutions to achieving the proposed architecture. Finally, we discuss challenges, open issues, and future research directions. We hope that the results of this study will serve as essential guidelines for further research in the human healthcare domain.

Identifying resilience strategies for disruption management in the healthcare supply chain during COVID-19 by digital innovations: A systematic literature review

The worldwide spread of the COVID-19 disease has had a catastrophic effect on healthcare supply chains. The current manuscript systematically analyzes existing studies mitigating strategies for disruption management in the healthcare supply chain during COVID-19. Using a systematic approach, we recognized 35 related papers. Artificial intelligence (AI), block chain, big data analytics, and simulation are the most important technologies employed in supply chain management in healthcare. The findings reveal that the published research has concentrated mainly on generating resilience plans for the management of COVID-19 impacts. Furthermore, the vulnerability of healthcare supply chains and the necessity of establishing better resilience methods are emphasized in most of the research. However, the practical application of these emerging tools for managing disturbance and warranting resilience in the supply chain has been examined only rarely. This article provides directions for additional research, which can guide researchers to develop and conduct impressive studies related to the healthcare supply chain for different disasters.

Edge-Fog-Cloud Computing Hierarchy for Improving Performance and Security of NB-IoT-Based Health Monitoring Systems

This paper proposes a three-computing-layer architecture consisting of Edge, Fog, and Cloud for remote health vital signs monitoring. The novelty of this architecture is in using the Narrow-Band IoT (NB-IoT) for communicating with a large number of devices and covering large areas with minimum power consumption. Additionally, the architecture reduces the communication delay as the edge layer serves the health terminal devices with initial decisions and prioritizes data transmission for minimizing congestion on base stations. The paper also investigates different authentication protocols for improving security while maintaining low computation and transmission time. For data analysis, different machine learning algorithms, such as decision tree, support vector machines, and logistic regression, are used on the three layers. The proposed architecture is evaluated using CloudSim, iFogSim, and ns3-NB-IoT on real data consisting of medical vital signs. The results show that the proposed architecture reduces the NB-IoT delay by 59.9%, the execution time by an average of 38.5%, and authentication time by 35.1% for a large number of devices. This paper concludes that the NB-IoT combined with edge, fog, and cloud computing can support efficient remote health monitoring for large devices and large areas.

Internet of Things and healthcare system: A systematic review of ethical issues

Background and Aims

The Internet of Things (IoTs) is a set of connected objects and devices that share data and pursue a common goal in different areas. IoT technology can significantly help the healthcare system by enabling the monitoring of elderly and chronic disease patients. Along with the growth of this technology, its challenges and limitations such as Connectivity, Compatibility, Standards, cost, legal, and ethical also increase. One of the most critical and challenging issues in the IoT is ethical issues. This study aims to explore the key ethical aspects of the IoT and Categorize them based on the executive phases of IoT in healthcare.

Methods

The current study was conducted in two phases using the mixed‐method approach. In the first phase, a systematic review was conducted in relevant databases to identify ethical issues of the IoT. In the second phase, a focus group discussion was conducted to classify the extracted data elements based on executive phases of IoT by medical informatics experts and computer engineerings.

Results

Among the 138 papers retrieved through the search strategy, 11 articles were selected, and 12 ethical issues related to IoT were identified. The obtained results revealed the importance of ethical issues of IoT, including security, confidentiality, privacy, anonymity, freedom to withdraw, informed consent, integrity, availability, authorization, access control, censoring, and eavesdropping. They were classified into five main categories of executive phases of IoT based on the five experts’ opinions affiliated with SUMS, including data collection, data storage, data process, data transmission, and data delivery.

Conclusion

Because of the key role of the IoT in disease prevention, real‐time tele‐monitoring of patient's functions, testing of treatments, health management, and health research, considering the risks relating to Health care and patient data is essential. Moreover, health policymakers should be aware of the ethical commitment to using IoT technology.

Prospect of Internet of Medical Things: A Review on Security Requirements and Solutions

With the widespread and increasing use of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices in all aspects of daily life, a hopeful future for people, data, and processes is emerging. Extensive spans allow for an integrated life cycle to be created from home to enterprise. The Internet of Medical things (IoMT) forms a flourishing surface that incorporates the sensitive information of human life being sent to doctors or hospitals. These open an enormous space for hackers to utilize flaws of the IoMT network to make a profit. This creates a demand for standardizing regulations and a secure system. Though many authorities are making standards, there are some lacking in the system which makes the product vulnerable. Although many established mechanisms are present for the IoT network, there are a number of obstacles preventing its general implementation in the IoMT network. One of the adoption challenges is the IoMT devices itself, because many IoMT networks consist of battery-powered devices with constrained processing capability. A general overview of the different security integrations with IoT applications has been presented in several papers. Therefore, this paper aims to provide an overview of the IoMT ecosystem, regulations, challenges of standards, security mechanisms using cryptographic solutions, physical unclonable functions (PUF)-based solutions, blockchain, and named data networking (NDN) as well, with pros and cons.