A systematic review of IoT in healthcare: Applications, techniques, and trends

Abstract Internet of Things (IoT) is an ever-expanding ecosystem that integrates software, hardware, physical objects, and computing devices to communicate, collect, and exchange data. The IoT provides a seamless platform to facilitate interactions between humans and a variety of physical and virtual things, including personalized healthcare domains. Lack of access to medical resources, growth of the elderly population with chronic diseases and their needs for remote monitoring, an increase in medical costs, and the desire for telemedicine in developing countries, make the IoT an interesting subject in healthcare systems. The IoT has a potential to decrease the strain on sanitary systems besides providing tailored health services to improve the quality of life. Therefore, this paper aims to identify, compare systematically, and classify existing investigations taxonomically in the Healthcare IoT (HIoT) systems by reviewing 146 articles between 2015 and 2020. Additionally, we present a comprehensive taxonomy in the HIoT, analyze the articles technically, and classify them into five categories, including sensor-based, resource-based, communication-based, application-based, and security-based approaches. Furthermore, the benefits and limitations of the selected methods, with a comprehensive comparison in terms of evaluation techniques, evaluation tools, and evaluation metrics, are included. Finally, based on the reviewed studies, power management, trust and privacy, fog computing, and resource management as leading open issues; tactile Internet, social networks, big data analytics, SDN/NFV, Internet of nano things, and blockchain as important future trends; and interoperability, real-testbed implementation, scalability, and mobility as challenges are worth more studying and researching in HIoT systems.