IoT based health monitoring system - Recent trends and directions

Abstract

Purpose Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has affected millions of people around the world, both socially and economically, and has fundamentally changed people’s lifestyles (Yoon & Shin, 2020). In Korea, these radical changes brought about a new lifestyle, known as “untact” era (UE) (KIM, 2021). Even in the absence of direct enforcement by the government, the tendency to avoid direct face-to-face contact seems to be widespread throughout the Korean society (Yoon & Shin, 2020). Recently, the fourth industrial revolution has become an essential tool for transitioning to digital, fully automated environments and cyber-physical systems in the medical field (Ćwiklicki et al., 2020). Internet of things (IoT), big data analytics, blockchain, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence have found successive applications in the medical and healthcare sector (Yu et al., 2022). For example, IoT enables the exchange of different types of health and medical information between various medical devices and medical institution system (Yu et al., 2022). The recent improvements in computing infrastructure and the emergence of various AI frameworks in ICT have made AI-based digital healthcare analysis more intelligent and more feasible for this smart healthcare era. According to the WHO, the world’s population is rapidly aging, this will lead to increases in chronic diseases as well as healthcare costs. In anticipation of this, countries are shifting the focuses of their healthcare systems from sickness and disease to prevention and wellness. In recent times wearable sensors and IoT had enabled remote monitoring of patient health especially for elderly citizens (Athavale & Krishnan, 2017; Malwade et al., 2018). Wearable sensors provide real-time monitoring of the elderly bio-signals allowing them to be independent while encouraging the elderly to manage stable chronic conditions, dementia, and frailty by themselves (Al-Shaqi et al., 2016). IoT applications and wearable sensors are well suited to monitoring the elderly because they meet the needs of information exchange and communication with care staff on a regular and continuing basis, allowing identification of elderly in need of healthcare assistance (Al-Shaqi et al., 2016; Athavale & Krishnan, 2017; Malwade et al., 2018). The smart healthcare system can evolve into a service that combines medical big data with ICT to help individuals manage their health remotely. Method A literature review will be performed to look at the trends and directions of wearable devices that can be used for health monitoring. In addition, results from this literature search were used to help us design and develop a real time health monitoring system that uses wearable and embedded sensors. Result and Discussion Results from the literature review will include the latest wearable devices that can be used for health monitoring, types of biosignals being collected, the advantages and disadvantages of the devices. We will also describe the development of the real-time health monitoring system that can be used for different daily activities such as driving, walking, and sleeping. Various Biosignals such as GAIT, electroencephalogram (EEG) and body motion etc. were collected and analyze for the development of models for early detection of stroke.