Towards fog-driven IoT eHealth:Promises and challenges of IoT in medicine and healthcare

Internet of Things (IoT) offers a seamless platform to connect people and objects to one another for enriching and making our lives easier. This vision carries us from compute-based centralized schemes to a more distributed environment offering a vast amount of applications such as smart wearables, smart home, smart mobility, and smart cities. In this paper we discuss applicability of IoT in healthcare and medicine by presenting a holistic architecture of IoT eHealth ecosystem. Healthcare is becoming increasingly difficult to manage due to insufficient and less effective healthcare services to meet the increasing demands of rising aging population with chronic diseases. We propose that this requires a transition from the clinic-centric treatment to patient-centric healthcare where each agent such as hospital, patient, and services are seamlessly connected to each other. This patient-centric IoT eHealth ecosystem needs a multi-layer architecture: (1) device, (2) fog computing and (3) cloud to empower handling of complex data in terms of its variety, speed, and latency. This fog-driven IoT architecture is followed by various case examples of services and applications that are implemented on those layers. Those examples range from mobile health, assisted living, e-medicine, implants, early warning systems, to population monitoring in smart cities. We then finally address the challenges of IoT eHealth such as data management, scalability, regulations, interoperability, device–network–human interfaces, security, and privacy

An Internet of things model for field service automation

Due to the competitive nature of the global economy, organisations are continuously seeking ways of cutting costs and increasing efficiency to gain a competitive advantage. Field service organisations that offer after sales support seek to gain a competitive advantage through downtime minimisation. Downtime is the time between service requests made by a customer or triggered by equipment failure and the completion of the service to rectify the problem by the field service team. Researchers have identified downtime as one of the key performance indicators for field service organisations. The lack of real-time access to information and inaccuracy of information are factors which contribute to the poor management of downtime. Various technology advancements have been adopted to address some of the challenges faced by field service organisations through automation. The emergence of an Internet of Things (IoT), has brought new enhancement possibilities to various industries, for instance, the manufacturing industry. The main research question that this study aims to address is “How can an Internet of Things be used to optimise field service automation?” The main research objective was to develop and evaluate a model for the optimisation of field services using an IoT’s features and technologies. The model aims at addressing challenges associated with the inaccuracy or/and lack of real-time access to information during downtime. The model developed is the theoretical artefact of the research methodology used in this study which is the Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM). The DSRM activities were adopted to fulfil the research objectives of this research. A literature review in the field services domain was conducted to establish the problems faced by field service organisations. Several interviews were held to verify the problems of FSM identified in literature and some potential solutions. During the design and development activity of the DSRM methodology, an IoT model for FSA was designed. The model consists of:The Four Layered Architecture; The Three Phase Data Flow Process; and Definition and descriptions of IoT-based elements and functions. The model was then used to drive the design, development, and evaluation of “proof of concept” prototype, the KapCha prototype. KapCha enables the optimisation of FSA using IoT techniques and features. The implementation of a sub-component of the KapCha system, in fulfilment of the research. The implementation of KapCha was applied to the context of a smart lighting environment in the case study. A two-phase evaluation was conducted to review both the theoretical model and the KapCha prototype. The model and KapCha prototype were evaluated using the Technical and Risk efficacy evaluation strategy from the Framework for Evaluation of Design Science (FEDS). The Technical Risk and Efficacy strategy made use of formative, artificial-summative and summative-naturalistic methods of evaluation. An artificial-summative evaluation was used to evaluate the design of the model. Iterative formative evaluations were conducted during the development of the KapCha. KapCha was then placed in a real-environment conditions and a summative-naturalistic evaluation was conducted. The summative-naturalistic evaluation was used to determine the performance of KapCha under real-world conditions to evaluate the extent it addresses FSA problems identified such as real-time communication and automated fault detection

Blockchain and Internet of Things in smart cities and drug supply management: Open issues, opportunities, and future directions

Blockchain-based drug supply management (DSM) requires powerful security and privacy procedures for high-level authentication, interoperability, and medical record sharing. Researchers have shown a surprising interest in Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart cities in recent years. By providing a variety of intelligent applications, such as intelligent transportation, industry 4.0, and smart financing, smart cities (SC) can improve the quality of life for their residents. Blockchain technology (BCT) can allow SC to offer a higher standard of security by keeping track of transactions in an immutable, secure, decentralized, and transparent distributed ledger. The goal of this study is to systematically explore the current state of research surrounding cutting-edge technologies, particularly the deployment of BCT and the IoT in DSM and SC. In this study, the defined keywords “blockchain”, “IoT”, drug supply management”, “healthcare”, and “smart cities” as well as their variations were used to conduct a systematic search of all relevant research articles that were collected from several databases such as Science Direct, JStor, Taylor & Francis, Sage, Emerald insight, IEEE, INFORMS, MDPI, ACM, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. The final collection of papers on the use of BCT and IoT in DSM and SC is organized into three categories. The first category contains articles about the development and design of DSM and SC applications that incorporate BCT and IoT, such as new architecture, system designs, frameworks, models, and algorithms. Studies that investigated the use of BCT and IoT in the DSM and SC make up the second category of research. The third category is comprised of review articles regarding the incorporation of BCT and IoT into DSM and SC-based applications. Furthermore, this paper identifies various motives for using BCT and IoT in DSM and SC, as well as open problems and makes recommendations. The current study contributes to the existing body of knowledge by offering a complete review of potential alternatives and finding areas where further research is needed. As a consequence of this, researchers are presented with intriguing potential to further create decentralized DSM and SC apps as a result of a comprehensive discussion of the relevance of BCT and its implementation.© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed