Foresight of Promising Technologies for Healthcare-IoT Convergence Service by Patent Analysis

The transplantation of modern innovations of the information and communication technology (ICT) field is contributing to the birth of beneficial services and effective production of them. Healthcare is no exception - new paradigms such as the ubiquitous healthcare (u-health) have been suggested as it is undergoing a process of convergence with smart device technologies and the Internet of Things (IoT) concept. This study aims to offer a foresight of promising technologies for the ICT-based healthcare by employing two technology forecasting methods. A network analysis is carried out for the keywords extracted from the abstract text of U.S. patent data. Then an expert panel interpreted each of the clusters in the network into a promising technology area by combining the meaning of keywords in it with professional knowledge and experience. As the result, five promising technology fields are proposed.