IoT and its global economic impact in healthcare

Discuss about the Medical Robotics and Computer Integrated Surgery.

Rise of smart devices and internet have paved way for different technological advancements. One of the most successful development from integration of the smart devices and internet is IoT (Internet of Things). It is a network of devices that exchanges and monitors real-time data to automate the network connected devices. The claims have been made that by the year 2025, IoT will have a global economic impact of over US$11 trillion and for Australia it has been forecasted at around $120 billion. The graph has stated the impact and influence that the subject can have globally. The subject of the proposed paper has proved itself to be of significant benefit in the different sectors from education to home and organisations and healthcare is no exception. The subject has introduced lifesaving measured in the healthcare industry and several examples are evident to validate the stated fact. The impact is so vital that a new term ‘IoMT (Internet of Medical Things)’ has been developed to discuss about the subject and healthcare as one. Hence the proposed paper will attempt at evaluating the advantages offered by the deemed technology as well as the security and other challenges that the IoT offers in the healthcare industry.

The discussed paper is a proposal for the research work to be conducted on the subject in the healthcare industry. The deemed paper will review the literary work that had been assessed in the past to earn an insight into the role of IoT in the healthcare industry. Followed by the research methodology that will be adopted to pursue the research aim and objectives of the paper. The research question for the proposed paper are listed as follows:

Tsai, Lai and Vasilakov (2014) states that the technological advancement that the end-users enjoy has been amplified since the introduction of the IoT. The subject has offered significant benefit to handle the things, semantic oriented standard and internet-oriented vision. The IoT devices includes the data of human health that contains oxygen, blood pressure and the heart rate. IoT is a global network that allows communication between things-to-things, human-to-human and human-to-things.

The paper discusses about the healthcare trends that can provide the growth, benefits and functionality of the IoT devices. There are different devices for the health care services and for the customers. The devices of IoT usually are connected through the internet with limited resources (Thomas, Onyimbo and Logeswaran 2016). These leads to vulnerable attacks to the devices with huge number attackers. In order to prevent from attackers who, attack maliciously, an authentication has been required to identify the identities and guarantee the security. The environment of IoT has a constraint resource with limited energy resources and processing (Lo, Ip and Yang 2016). With the feature of robustness in security for a light weight authentication has preserve the energy to fit the capabilities of processing. Internet of Things in Healthcare connects the asset of the devices for monitoring the remote health, imaging the devices, X-rays and so on (Miranda et al. 2016). On the holistic perspective view, there are challenges that need to be tackled. Some of the common challenges are healthcare workers and patients getting connected to integrated systems, secure standards, interoperability health devices, and so on (Desai, Sheth and Anantharam 2015). IoT health sphere and health sector sphere are wearables. In both the spheres, healthcare payer models and healthcare provider arises customer-oriented wearables with professional devices.0

Real-time patient monitoring, remote medical assistance, and seamless communication

Another interesting thing about the study is the medical robots that are used in surgery, for rehabilitation and Panasonic’s HOSPI hospital robots that take care of medication, drinks and many more deliveries (Taylor et al. 2016). According to the predictions made in Worldwide Healthcare IT in the year 2017, it was mention that by the end of 2019, 50 % of robot will be increase to carry out certain task like food delivery, supplies delivery, and medication delivery (Nagai et al. 2017). It can better be understood as to free the human resources and take care of the routine tasks. Until 2020, a few drivers and benefits were mentioned to influence the predictions and evaluations in the IoT healthcare deployment (Botta et al. 2016). There are many patients that fit in the overall healthcare drivers that include the patients demands, healthcare workers, care quality improvement, challenges in budgetary, behaviour changes and aging populations. The benefits of Internet of Thing (IoT) in healthcare revolves around the cost savings, increased innovation, and organization visibility. Additionally, other benefits included in IoT are higher productivity workforce, collaboration in a better way and new business models creation. At a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR), it was illustrated that the use of remote monitoring of patients increases through the drive of global market. The overall value of IoT heathcare in the market is of $169.32 bilion which has estimated to become by 2020 and remote monitoring of patient will be the major part (Da Xu, He and Li 2014).

The model of internet of Things can reduce the costs significantly and connect the device for communication. Internet of Things has the ability to communicate between gateways, devices and Cloud and exchange messages among this device that can provide an end-to-end solution comprehensively (Moosavi et al. 2015). The messages flow between the parties and objectives with for main communication patterns. Internet of Things have certain concerns in healthcare:

• The major concern is the lack of medical accessibility in the remote areas
• The cost has been increase with a high quality of health care.
• The strength of the IoT is the patience demand that can be raise and the weakness is that different professionals have different medical shortage. There are different diagnostics that define the clinical pathways for the Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS). The system is able to include the step-by-step process to match the clinical decision-making that can handle the authorization and customization of trained professionals with respective of the different clinicians. The negotiation, cost, and schedule has been set with the team who have sponsored with the perspectives of the project management. The factor that is the most important is the risk management. The manager of the program and the health workers get connected to the doctor. Several data programs are set for the system to define the identity and the diseases trends.

The challenges that the researchers were mainly facing in the authentication mechanisms that can support various IoT devices. One of the advantages of the authentication methods is that smartphone also works for watches, sensors, microchips and even thermostat. Technology though cannot stop ageing or eradicating the chronic diseases but can at least make healthcare easy in terms of accessibility. The paradigm of internet of Things (IoT) in health care allows competently function the medical centres and provide better treatment for patients. The IoT technology uses an unparalleled prospect that improve the efficiency and quality of the treatments and the patients’ health.

Review of relevant literature

IoT can provide medical assistance remotely. Through a smart mobile application, the patients are able to contact doctors stay many kilometres away. It provides better healthcare access for the rural area and for elderly people to live a long independent living. With the devices of IoT a virtual data has been gathered to transfer and track the real-time data (Nkenyereye and Jang 2016). The condition of the patients is known through reports and alerts. IoT has enabled the real-time tracking, alerting and monitoring for better accuracy, apt intervention, hands-on treatment and improve the result of complete care of the patient. Health care devices sends huge amount of data to real-time application and manage the unavailable access to cloud in a short period of time. It has become tough for a health care provider to analyse manually the data that has originated from multiple devices. In real-time, the IoT devices analyse, collect and report the data and store only the raw data from it. Providers are able to get access over cloud to get access to the final reports with graphs. The operations of health care get vital analytics and insight data-driven that helps to speed-up the decision-making with less errors. The patience care workflow can be automated through the Internet of Thing healthcare mobility solution, healthcare facilities of next-generation and other technologies that are new. The effective delivery of healthcare services enables Internet of Things to provide communication from machine-to-machine, movement of data, exchange of information and interoperability. IoT brings down the cost by utilizing the quality of resources, improving the planning and allocation, and cutting down the visits that are not necessary. In the case of medical emergency such as diabetes, asthma attacks, heart failure and more, real-time monitoring can save lives through connected devices. Smartphone app is connected to smart medical devices for real-time monitoring and collect medical and health care related data, and use of smartphone data connection that can transfer collected information to a physician. The device of IoT collects the health data and transfers the data of the levels blood sugar, weight, blood pressure, oxygen and ECGs (Kadarla et al. 2017). The cloud stores all this data through Internet of Thing devices and allow the authorized person to access the data by sharing it to them. The athorized person can be an external consultant, health firm participants, insurance company, or physician, and allow them to then to see into all the data that has collected from any device, place, or time.

Adoption of a positivism philosophy

IoT in healthcare has several challenges related to technical and regulator work. The main focus is the interoperability stability that has fragmented different areas of technical standards. The frameworks and the standard processes of IoT devices will be established. There have been some regulations issues due to the lack of government support and other bodies. The handling level of the personal data has mainly defined the confidentiality and integrity. The machine-to-machine patterns of interface were discussed for the work of physical objects. There are various levels that define the factors influencing the internal and the external setup. The findings also include the trends that are related to the person allergies and the healthcare. A study has been conducted by the Centre of Connected Health Policy (CCHP) with 30-day readmission rate of 50% reduction (Ahmed, 2017). This has happened due to heart failure of patients that were monitoring remote patient. There are recommendations for the technology that can help to improve the physical activities. The applications are set for different doctors that have different set of experience. This set of experience work collaboratively to handle the doctors complement based on the technology inputs.

The research work will be pursued based on the platform established by analysing previous literary work that had been conducted over the IoT and healthcare. The positivism philosophy will be adopted as the research philosophy for the proposed research study. The selection of the philosophy is based on the fact that the selected research will take in account of both the scientific and social data relevant to the IoT and healthcare as part of the study. The approach for the established paper will be the deductive approach along with the analytical design as the research design. The data will be collected by adopting both the primary and secondary data. The primary data collected will also consider both the qualitative and quantitative data.

Two of the globally adopted research philosophy are the interpretivism and positivism research methodology. The former philosophy takes account of only the scientific or factual data and gives no consideration to the abstract or social data. The discussed philosophy does not cite any proper attention to the human factor which is a vital part for the proposed research as healthcare is derived by the humans and for the humans. On the contrary, positivism takes account of the social and abstract factor which are then analysed differently on the base of the requirement of the paper. The most significant benefit of the deemed philosophy is that the logical data and techniques are analysed based upon the social factors which is great to identify real-world issues and applications. Hence, it would be suitable to state that the latter philosophy is the most suitable to pursue the research objective of the paper.

Exploration of scientific and social data

Deductive and inductive are the two of the most commonly adopted approach for the research works. The former research approach is suitable for the paper where relationships are developed taking a closer view of the facts and the subjects to determine the issues, benefits and other significant relevant factors. While the latter is most suitable for the scholarly works where solutions for identified problems or to enhance the capabilities of the subject(s) by inducing new tools or techniques. Based upon the statements above and the objectives that are to be pursued, deductive approach is the most suitable for the proposed work and hence the selection.

The identified purpose of the proposed research work can be completed by evaluating the healthcare stakeholders (internal and external) and their perception because the accurate data can be collected by the sources relevant to it. Hence, a questionnaire sample will be distributed among the healthcare units and the patients who have witnessed the use of the IoT in the healthcare. Additionally, selective individuals will be interviewed to understand the perception of the users and in the process collect the social data. However, the questionnaire prepared for the survey along with the interview questions will be derive d based on the findings from the literary work that had been assessed in the past. Reviewing, the literary work on the subjects of the past will also enable, the author to determine some crucial facts or figures that will be of great significance in concluding the proposed research work.

The sampling of the collected data will take account of both the likelihood and non-likelihood inspection method. The likelihood inspection method will be used to analyse the data that had been collected from the survey while, the latter will assist in sampling of the interview findings. The collected findings from both the source of primary data collection method will then be compare with the literary work to conclude the findings. The analysis of the collected data will be done by taking assistance of analytical tools such as the MS-Excel. If any additional tools or techniques are adopted to pursue with the paper, it will be attached research report.

Conclusion

From the study that has been done in this paper, it has concluded that a change was brought to the model of delivery with the use of Internet of Thing (IoT) in the healthcare service sector. There were different IoT devices that can be connected easily for communication and provide remote assistance. It was helpful for the revolutionary changes in the IoT. With the IoT devices the changes brought in the factor of remote consulting was very much helpful in detecting the epidemic diseases. The healthcare delivery model and the new business model has been facilitated irrespective of the challenges and compared with the primary care that are traditional management.

Technical challenges related to IoT in healthcare

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