Internet Of Things In Healthcare: Impact And Usage

Background

The Internet of Things (IoT) deals with things that interact with Internet which employs the sensors, transceivers, as well as microcontrollers that empowers the communication as well as built similar types of protocol stacks that helps in interacting with each other as well as communicating with each other (Moosavi, Gia, Nigussie,  Rahmani, Virtanen, Tenhunen & Isoaho, 2016). This IoT also helps to communicate with other users making a constructive part of Internet. In the present days, the internet impacts on different aspects in everyday life of the users. With the availability of these things, there are different application which are developed on IoT based. In these application the physical object is generally connected with the Internet which employs sensor devices. One of the most important sector which mostly depends on the Internet of Things is healthcare centers. The dependency is increasing gradually which helps to enhance the accessing care, strengthens the care quality and also helps to reduce the cost of health care.

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Internet of Things mainly ensures personalization that are related to healthcare services. The IoT helps to maintain the digital identity for all the patients involved in the system. The issue that is encountered by the health care centers is the non-availability in the health care systems. Many problems in the health care systems remains undetected in the traditional health care systems (Kodali, Swamy & Lakshmi, 2015). To mitigate these issues, the systems that are based on IoT are considered as persuasive, as well as powerful are very much helpful for monitoring as well as analyzing the data of the patient very easily. In the healthcare that is based on healthcare generally has different distributed devices that are gathered, analyzed as well as can pass the real time information related to heath issues in the cloud. This IoT devices in the healthcare systems collects, analyze, as well as store the streams of big data in different forms as well as activate all the alarms that are context diagrams. The innovative idea of Internet of Things in the healthcare system allows ubiquitous as well as continuous medical device access from the devices that are connected via Internet.

This report details the study of Internet of Things in the health care centers. With the availability of Internet of Things in the health care system, many features are enabled that helps the users as well as the official to maintain the system in a better way. This report consist of details of the Internet of Things in the healthcare systems. Many journals and articles are reviewed to carry out this research study. There are many healthcare organizations that has follows the applications that are used in Internet of Things.

Aim, Objectives and Research Questions

The aim of the study is to analyze impact of the Internet of Things in Healthcare.

Following are objectives of the research:

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  • To analyze the impact of Internet of Things on healthcare
  • To identify issues in the Internet of Things on healthcare
  • To provide strategies for mitigating these issues in the Internet of Things in healthcare

Following are the research questions:

  • What is the impact of Internet of Things on healthcare?
  • What are issues in the Internet of Things on healthcare?
  • How to mitigate these issues in the Internet of Things in healthcare?

Definition of Internet of Things

According to Da Xu et al. (2014), the healthcare facilities one of the basic things that a person needs in day to day life. But, the cost of the services are increasing gradually with unavailable services provided by the health care system. The physicians are also not able to provide proper service to the patients. As stated by Islam et al. (2015), in the article the first and foremost problem that is associated with health care system is lacking of medical facilities for tracking the history of patients which provides an effective treatment. So, it is necessary for optimizing the system of health cares for making it more efficient. There are many approaches based on cloud computing that are used for integrating the data of the hospital. The service of Internet of Things are used by organization from small and big for maintaining the data in the health care centers. The Internet of Things are capable of maintaining all the records of the patients that are available. The approach of Internet of Things helps to reduce the monopoly of the traditional hospitals. With the help of Internet of Things, the government can run the healthcare facilities to provide a fair community of patients.

Recently, with the increment of applications in the healthcare centers there is requirement of the wearable technologies that are increasing with their need. The medical applications available for monitoring the human body are mostly not comfortable to wear. The internet of things provides the development of the medical wearable comfortable. This is done by integrating the ECG, SpO2 as well as accelerometer sensors in single device.

Li, Da & Zhao (2015) stated IoT as a revolutionizing Internet work. In future, it is expected that billions and billions of devices and applications will get connected with the human and there will be a proper communication process in between human and device. This will generate huge amount of data that will help to provide the humans with the information and these will help to control all the device remotely. On an argument Stankovic (2014), stated that Internet of Things that are used in the health care centers generally has limited power in their batteries as well as there is limited latencies that are associated with the device. The objective of Internet of Things is a concept that is used to connect all the information with the Internet. The Internet of Things that are used in the medical services has different descriptive models that are related to the Internet of Things. The models that are used in the medical applications usually have different IoT applications.  

Literature Review

Rahmani et al. (2015) stated one of these technologies that are used as Internet of Things in the medical centers. ZigBee is one such technology that is used as a smart application in the health care centers. There are different communication protocols that are wireless. Two of such protocols are Bluetooth and 802.11 are already in use. But, the wireless networks faces some basic challenges while they are used in the medical centers. He & Zeadally (2015) has explained those challenges as power consumption and scalability. One such possible technology that mitigates all these issues is ZigBee. He & Zeadally (2015) introduced ZigBee to overcome the problems that are faced by Bluetooth and WLAN. The technology of ZigBee uses wireless area network that have low data rate as well as operate at low power as well as low cost. The power that is consumed is because of the sleep mode operation in the end devices. Pang et al. (2015), stated that the healthcare is becoming reliable on the services of Internet of Things and with the involvement of IoT, the services in the health cares are improving with limited cost and amplifying the caring quality.

Manogaran et al. (2018), in his article stated that there are many process that are involved in the sensors of technology. The sensors that are involved helps the healthcare center to be more economical, and are easier to install and are also cost efficient. This makes the application object smarter. According to Darwish et al. (2017), this are the first reasons that makes the Internet of Things more popular among the health care centers. This author has defined Internet of Things as sensing capabilities which are necessary for the smarter things. The second reason which makes Internet of Things smarter, according to Darwish et al. (2017), is that this technology mainly supports the interaction in between the user and the application by combining wireless networks such as NFC (Near Field Communication), Wireless sensor network (WSN), Bluetooth, LPWA (low-power wide-area networks), and LoRa (Long Range Wide Area Networks). The technology that is stated as the third technology of the IoT application is the RFID technology (Radio Frequency Identification). This technology helps to design microchips for the wireless communication of data and has proved as a great improvement over traditional barcode (Darwish et al., 2017). The RFID tags that are used in the stores most sensitive data because it is capable of identifying the object automatically. The security of RFID tags are very important as it provides extra tuning. The fourth technology and the last technology that is explained by Darwish et al. (2017) is the cloud computing technology of Internet of Things. This is necessary for analyzing all big data that comes from the health care centers. The data that are generated from the smart things are very difficult to manage. The actions that are performed by this technology is a basic part of the Internet of Things.

Definition of Internet of Things

According to Hassanalieragh et al. (2015), using the Internet of Things in future basically helps in mixing the information from user side and the actions from the smart things. In future, the application of IoT can be the ultimate objective for carrying automation for all the processes that includes behavior of humans. The applications of Internet of Things in future will help to make all the processes available automatic. Fernandez & Pallis (2014) stated the in future the main ultimate objective of all the organization and industries is to convert all the processes to automatic process which also includes human behavior, and the applications will also directly influence the human actions.  The ultimate objective is defined as cyber-physical system (CPS) by Fernandez & Pallis (2014). CPS and the IoT follows similar types of concepts. These two technologies use same type of technology. The technologies that are used in both the technologies are sensors, wireless networks and cloud computing. These processes are used for automation of processes. According to Rahmani et al. (2018), there is only one difference in CPS. The focus of CPS is to focus on actuation of the objects, talking about the IoTs and controlling the entities in the system. The focus of CPS is also on network structure that is used for interaction of the objects that allows collection as well as integration of data.

Outline of Research: The research methodology that will be carried throughout this research paper is described below. For conducting this study, research philosophy that will be used is positivism philosophy. For the data collection method, qualitative as well as quantitative research analysis will be carried out all through. Research approach that is carried out through this research study is deductive approach. All these methodologies are explained below in details.

Research Philosophy: Philosophy is carried out in four way while carrying a research study. The four types of research philosophy are interpretivism, pragmatism, positivism and realism. The positivism philosophy has been used in this research as it deals with the scientific knowledge of impact of internet of things in healthcare.

Approach of Research: The research approach is deductive approach of research. This approach will help the researcher to get an assumption about validity of the points that are taken into the research paper. The assumption is right or wrong is checked in the deductive approach of research methodology.

Research Design: For carrying out this research paper in descriptive research design, a particular problem of the research will be being carried out for the research paper. The descriptive research design describes about how the research study will be carried out with and who will be involved in the research study. This also address about where the research study is being carried out.

Use of IoT in Health care centers

Data Collection Method and Data Analysis: The collection of data about the Internet of Things in different healthcare centers, secondary research data collection method will carried out for analyzing the usage of IoT in the medical organizations. The secondary data collection method has been used in this research. Data has been collected using online journals, books, governmental databases. 

Sample size: The sample size for this research study has been 14 online journals related to the Internet of things in healthcare. All the journals have been authorized and verified with author names and published after 2012.

Ethical consideration: This research will follow all the research ethics and guidelines. Data will be secured under the Data Protection Act 1998. Under this act, no data will be shared with anyone and not published until the study is completed. There will be in change in the original data and information.

Conclusion

From the above stated proposal, it can be studied that this research proposal clearly states all the factors that are advantageous for implementing Internet of Things in the health care centers. There are numerous factors that proves that IoT is very useful to the medical organization with the increasing trend of Information Technology. For carrying out this literature review, 14 journal articles are analyzed from different authors. This report consist of details of the Internet of Things in the healthcare systems. Many journals and articles are reviewed to carry out this research study. The journals and paper taken for analysis were scholarly articles and views of different authors are presented in this paper which states the importance of Internet of Things in Health care centers. This research will help in understanding the importance of the Internet of Thing in Healthcare. This research has also helped in identifying the issues found in the healthcare industry due to the internet of things.  There are many healthcare organizations that has follows the applications that are used in Internet of Things. The use of various IoT devices in the healthcare industry have been discussed. The changes in the industry after the use of the IoT in the healthcare services have been analyzed in the research. The expected outcomes of the research will be strategies to mitigate issues in the healthcare industry due to internet of things and its positive impact on the healthcare industry.

References

Da Xu, L., He, W., & Li, S. (2014). Internet of things in industries: A survey. IEEE Transactions on industrial informatics, 10(4), 2233-2243.

Darwish, A., Hassanien, A. E., Elhoseny, M., Sangaiah, A. K., & Muhammad, K. (2017). The impact of the hybrid platform of internet of things and cloud computing on healthcare systems: Opportunities, challenges, and open problems. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, 1-16.

Fernandez, F., & Pallis, G. C. (2014, November). Opportunities and challenges of the Internet of Things for healthcare: Systems engineering perspective. In Wireless Mobile Communication and Healthcare (Mobihealth), 2014 EAI 4th International Conference on (pp. 263-266). IEEE.

Hassanalieragh, M., Page, A., Soyata, T., Sharma, G., Aktas, M., Mateos, G., … & Andreescu, S. (2015, June). Health monitoring and management using Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensing with cloud-based processing: Opportunities and challenges. In 2015 IEEE international conference on services computing (SCC) (pp. 285-292). IEEE.

He, D., & Zeadally, S. (2015). An analysis of rfid authentication schemes for internet of things in healthcare environment using elliptic curve cryptography. IEEE internet of things journal, 2(1), 72-83.

Islam, S. R., Kwak, D., Kabir, M. H., Hossain, M., & Kwak, K. S. (2015). The internet of things for health care: a comprehensive survey. IEEE Access, 3, 678-708.

Kodali, R. K., Swamy, G., & Lakshmi, B. (2015, December). An implementation of IoT for healthcare. In Intelligent Computational Systems (RAICS), 2015 IEEE Recent Advances in (pp. 411-416). IEEE.

Li, S., Da Xu, L., & Zhao, S. (2015). The internet of things: a survey. Information Systems Frontiers, 17(2), 243-259.

Manogaran, G., Varatharajan, R., Lopez, D., Kumar, P. M., Sundarasekar, R., & Thota, C. (2018). A new architecture of Internet of Things and big data ecosystem for secured smart healthcare monitoring and alerting system. Future Generation Computer Systems, 82, 375-387.

Moosavi, S. R., Gia, T. N., Nigussie, E., Rahmani, A. M., Virtanen, S., Tenhunen, H., & Isoaho, J. (2016). End-to-end security scheme for mobility enabled healthcare Internet of Things. Future Generation Computer Systems, 64, 108-124.

Pang, Z., Zheng, L., Tian, J., Kao-Walter, S., Dubrova, E., & Chen, Q. (2015). Design of a terminal solution for integration of in-home health care devices and services towards the Internet-of-Things. Enterprise Information Systems, 9(1), 86-116.

Rahmani, A. M., Gia, T. N., Negash, B., Anzanpour, A., Azimi, I., Jiang, M., & Liljeberg, P. (2018). Exploiting smart e-Health gateways at the edge of healthcare Internet-of-Things: A fog computing approach. Future Generation Computer Systems, 78, 641-658.

Rahmani, A. M., Thanigaivelan, N. K., Gia, T. N., Granados, J., Negash, B., Liljeberg, P., & Tenhunen, H. (2015, January). Smart e-health gateway: Bringing intelligence to internet-of-things based ubiquitous healthcare systems. In Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), 2015 12th Annual IEEE (pp. 826-834). IEEE.

Stankovic, J. A. (2014). Research directions for the internet of things. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 1(1), 3-9.