IoT-based vital sign monitoring: A literature review

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) applied to the health area is in significant growth, with companies putting effort into developing specialized devices. Remote patient healthcare monitoring, in particular, benefits society as it unburdens hospitals and helps patients with chronic diseases. Analyzing the health status with IoT and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is new in the digital community. The literature yet presents a limited number of references explicitly concerning the topic of qualified data acquisition. In this sense, the present literature review aims to update the joint subject of IoT and vital signs, seeking to understand the state-of-the-art and future directions. We have analyzed 78 articles and IoT manufacturer websites that address vital signs collection to answer a group of primary and specific questions. In particular, we revisited architectures, communication protocols, data acquisition mechanisms, evaluation metrics, and how to efficiently transfer data through the lens of sensors, actuators, and healthcare. Currently, two themes are considered as promising directions for studies in the joint area of IoT and vital sign-based healthcare monitoring. The first is the connection promotion between third-party applications and IoT devices to collect and process time-critical data with the support of edge, fog, and cloud infrastructures. The second theme again brings the focus to data compression methodologies since monitoring vital signs in a smart city geographical area naturally requires strategies to optimize network bandwidth consumption and data storage on computational resources. Moreover, both themes are directly linked to energy-saving approaches and quality of service (QoS) for efficient patient healthcare checking.