ITC560 Emerging Technology And Innovations

            IoT has been implemented in various businesses for meeting their objectives and achieving success. IoT in healthcare would be of great help to the healthcare institutes (Subasi, Radhwan & Kurdi, 2018). Some reasons why healthcare would need IoT are turning data into actions; the use of IoT would help the measurable health situations improve. It is known that data affects the performance; as a result tracking of health for better results and object measurement are reasons why healthcares need IoT. IoT can also be utilized to improve the patients’ health; IoT helps in updating the doctors regarding the patients’ health and their betterment (Thota, Sundarasekar & Manogaran, 2018).

The mobile devices of doctors can be connected to the network and they are able to receive updates regarding their patients. IoT also provides an advantage of promoting preventive care, where prevention is the primary aim of the institute. It helps the patients to live in a healthy manner (Tyagi, Agarwal & Maheshwari, 2016). It also helps in enhancing patient engagement as well as satisfaction, for advance care management, for advance management of population health and many more.

Problem or challenges

            Along with advantages, IoT in healthcare also has various disadvantages. Some of the disadvantages faced by the institutes are regarding storing, securing and managing data. One more barrier includes the deficiency of EHR. Along with the security and reliability issues some more issues that forms as barriers to the operations of the institute are the staffs who do not know to operate it (Elhoseny, Ramírez-González & Abu-Elnasr, 2018). They do not have enough knowledge regarding its handling. This is because of the lack of training provided to the staffs about the uses and operations of IoT. Some disadvantages of IoT in healthcare are mentioned in details below

• Security: The main concern of the institutes using IoT is the security of data. The security of personal health information (PHI) which is transmitted and stored by various devices that are connected to each other. Control on the access to the data has to be maintained for security issues (Darshan & Anandakumar, 2015). This would also help them ensure their compliance with the HIPAA regulations. Most of the institutes convince people saying that they secure their data by encrypting them, most of the time institutes do not have the control on security of data saved in the mobile devices that are used as data access points. This is a major threat to the organizations; this threat is directly proportional to the new devices added in the network. It is very difficult to maintain the security of all the devices or data access points, this can only be done by sacrificing the experience of user. The cost as well as resources required in this process is too much. One more important threat to the institute’s data is the theft of a data access device. Suppose if the mobile phone of a doctor is lost, it would be a great loss to the institute because the data regarding patients might be stolen and used for ill purposes.
• Integration: The amount of devices connected in the network is also one of the major threats to the healthcare institute. This brings about barriers in the implementation of activity in a successful manner (Laplante & Laplante, 2016). The network as various devices connected to it which provides freedom of access to data to the users. This creates a problem in the communication among the members. The problem in this is that, the manufacturers of the devices have not agreed on the set of various communication standards and protocols. Many devices might be connected to a particular network and getting access to data, at the same time the process is made complicated by various communication protocols as well as standards (Hou & Yeh, 2015). There is no uniformity between the devices used for medical purposes; this reduces the chances of success by using IoT in healthcare.
• Accuracy: The overall process of collecting as well as aggregating data comes along with various complications. Healthcare IoT has been proved to be producing huge amount of useful data. This information can be used for the betterment of patients by extracting insights from the huge amount of data (Lee & Lee, 2015). Extracting insights from the huge amount of data is very problematic if proper programs of sophisticated analytics and data professionals are not present. Identifying the actionable and useful insights is very important; this has been becoming difficult for medical specialists and physicians as the information keeps in growing. There are many concerns regarding the amount of data because the health institutes collect huge amount of data. It reduces the quality of decision making. As the number of connected devices that collect as well as generate big data, the concerns are also increasing.
• Cost: IoT is not that affordable for the common man. The increasing cost of implementing IoT in healthcare is the major threat for the institutes especially the ones situated in developed countries. Though IoT provides various advantages to the healthcare institutes such as “Medical Tourism” and many more. Along with the advantages, there are many disadvantages that impose serious threat to the institutes (Bhatt, Dey & Ashour, 2017). IoT in healthcare is a concept that seems fascinating but it could not solve the cost issue till now. In order to make institutes implement IoT and utilize its advantages completely, the stakeholders should make it cheaper. If this is not done, then it will stay out of reach and only people those who belong to high class would be able to afford it. Implementing IoT in business includes various hidden costs; these costs are network communication costs, administration labor costs, technical support costs and some more. The network communication costs are associated with different connecting devices into the internet. Very often, this is done with the help of wireless sensor networks, Wi-Fi, mobile network and radio frequency identification. The costs that are related to the day-to-day management as well as operation of the assets of IoT and the business processes.

References

Bhatt, C., Dey, N., & Ashour, A. S. (Eds.). (2017). Internet of things and big data technologies for next generation healthcare.

Darshan, K. R., & Anandakumar, K. R. (2015, December). A comprehensive review on usage of Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare system. In Emerging Research in Electronics, Computer Science and Technology (ICERECT), 2015 International Conference on (pp. 132-136). IEEE.

Elhoseny, M., Ramírez-González, G., Abu-Elnasr, O. M., Shawkat, S. A., Arunkumar, N., & Farouk, A. (2018). Secure medical data transmission model for IoT-based healthcare systems. IEEE Access, 6, 20596-20608.

Hou, J. L., & Yeh, K. H. (2015). Novel authentication schemes for IoT based healthcare systems. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 11(11), 183659.

Laplante, P. A., & Laplante, N. (2016). The internet of things in healthcare: Potential applications and challenges. IT Professional, (3), 2-4.

Lee, I., & Lee, K. (2015). The Internet of Things (IoT): Applications, investments, and challenges for enterprises. Business Horizons, 58(4), 431-440.

Subasi, A., Radhwan, M., Kurdi, R., & Khateeb, K. (2018, February). IoT based mobile healthcare system for human activity recognition. In Learning and Technology Conference (L&T), 2018 15th (pp. 29-34). IEEE.

Thota, C., Sundarasekar, R., Manogaran, G., Varatharajan, R., & Priyan, M. K. (2018). Centralized fog computing security platform for IoT and cloud in healthcare system. In Exploring the convergence of big data and the internet of things (pp. 141-154). IGI Global.

Tyagi, S., Agarwal, A., & Maheshwari, P. (2016, January). A conceptual framework for IoT-based healthcare system using cloud computing. In Cloud System and Big Data Engineering (Confluence), 2016 6th International Conference (pp. 503-507). IEEE.