Exploring Research Trends in Healthcare 4.0

Abstract

In recent years, healthcare is being challenged to deal with global aging, an increasing number of chronic patients, and growing demand for more personalized services. From this standpoint, it is comprehensible that health is longing for solutions to enhance its quality while reducing costs. In this light, the technological development brought by Industry 4.0 arises surrounded by high expectations of solving, or at least minimizing, some of the aforementioned questions. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the current state of the health revolution, named Healthcare 4.0, and follows a systematic methodology to select the documents retrieved from Web of Science and Scopus. Firstly, keywords were chosen to execute the search in the scientific databases. Then, inclusion and exclusion criteria were used to define the final sample of 130 articles. Lastly, a bibliometric analysis was performed for a better understanding of the ongoing health revolution. With the assistance of the bibliometrix R-tool, graphics and statistics were designed in order to recognize publication patterns. It was concluded that, although Healthcare 4.0 is still a recent research topic, increasing attention is being given to it. The most influential authors and countries were also detected, enabling the recognition of India as the main reference in the subject. Moreover, the relevance of IEEE journals to Healthcare 4.0 was identified, and the importance of artificial intelligence was also revealed.