Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) Applications in E-Health Systems Context: An Overview and Research Challenges

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been adopted by several areas of society, such as smart transportation systems, smart cities, smart agriculture, smart energy, and smart healthcare. Healthcare is an area that takes a lot of benefits from IoT technology (composing the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)) since low-cost devices and sensors can be used to create medical assistance systems, reducing the deployment and maintenance costs, and at the same time, improving the patients and their family quality of life. However, only IoT is not able to support the complexity of e-health applications. For instance, sensors can generate a large amount of data, and IoT devices do not have enough computational capabilities to process and store these data. Thus, the cloud and fog technologies emerge to mitigate the IoT limitations, expanding the IoMT applications capacities. Cloud computing provides virtually unlimited computational resources, while fog pushes the resources closest to the end-users, reducing the data transfer latency. Therefore, the IoT, fog, and cloud computing integration provides a robust environment for e-health systems deployment, allowing plenty of different types of IoMT applications. In this paper, we conduct a systematic mapping with the goal to overview the current state-of-the-art in IoMT applications using IoT, fog, and cloud infrastructures.