Remote health monitoring protocols for IoT-enabled healthcare infrastructure

Abstract One of the major benefits of the Internet of Things (IoT) is its role in revolutionizing the conventional concept of healthcare which was primarily reactive in nature. By enabling applications ranging from remote health monitoring of chronic diseases to proactive wellness management, IoT infrastructure can offer improved quality of life to citizens especially to elder adults, differently abled citizens, and patients suffering from chronic diseases. In practice, IoT-based healthcare infrastructure enables the collection of medical devices (both wearable and implantable) and applications to get connected through the Internet. Hence, quality of treatment can be improved through constant medical supervision of patients under free-living conditions which augment the existing medical infrastructure. Challenges such as providing energy efficiency, timely data delivery, and reliable delivery of health data need to be taken care of while designing protocols for such a system. In this chapter, the system architecture for remote health monitoring and issues in designing protocols for such a system are discussed. Both proactive system and energy-aware state-of-the-art protocols are thoroughly reviewed along with protocol standards. Open issues are also described to indicate the need to work further in this domain.