Technological Features of Internet of Things in Medicine: A Systematic Mapping Study

Abstract

Nowadays, applications for the Internet of Things (IoT) have been introduced in different fields of medicine to provide more efficient medical services to the patients. A systematic mapping study was conducted to answer ten research questions with the purposes of identifying and classifying the present medical IoT technological features as well as recognizing the opportunities for future developments. We reviewed how cloud, wearable technologies, wireless communication technologies, messaging protocols, security methods, development boards, microcontrollers, mobile/IoT operating systems, and programming languages have been engaged in medical IoT. Based on specific inclusion/exclusion criteria, 89 papers, published between 2000 and 2018, were screened and selected. It was found that IoT studies, with a publication rise between 2015 and 2018, predominantly dealt with the following IoT features: (a) wearable sensor types of chiefly accelerometer and ECG placed on 16 different body parts, especially the wrist (33%) and the chest (21%) or implanted on the bone; (b) wireless communication technologies of Bluetooth, cellular networks, and Wi-Fi; (c) messaging protocols of mostly MQTT; (d) utilizing cloud for both storing and analyzing data; (e) the security methods of encryption, authentication, watermark, and error control; (f) the microcontrollers belonging to Atmel ATmega and ARM Cortex-M3 families; (g) Android as the commonly used mobile operating system and TinyOS and ContikiOS as the commonly used IoT operating systems; (h) Arduino and Raspberry Pi development boards; and finally (i) MATLAB as the most frequently employed programming language in validation research. The identified gaps/opportunities for future exploration are, namely, employment of fog/edge computing in storage and processing big data, the overlooked efficient features of CoAP messaging protocol, the unnoticed advantages of AVR Xmega and Cortex-M microcontroller families, employment of the programming languages of Python for its significant capabilities in evaluation and validation research, development of the applications being supported by the mobile/IoT operating systems in order to provide connection possibility among all IoT devices in medicine, exploiting wireless communication technologies such as BLE, ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, NFC, and 5G to reduce power consumption and costs, and finally uncovering the security methods, usually used in IoT applications, in order to make other applications more trustworthy.