Internet of things in medicine: A systematic mapping study

Context: The current studies on IoT in healthcare have reviewed the uses of this technology in a combination of healthcare domains, including nursing, rehabilitation sciences, ambient assisted living (AAL), medicine, etc. However, no review study has scrutinized IoT advances exclusively in medicine irrespective of other healthcare domains. Objectives: The purpose of the current study was to identify and map the current IoT developments in medicine through providing graphical/tabular classifications on the current experimental and practical IoT information in medicine, the involved medical sub-fields, the locations of IoT use in medicine, and the bibliometric information about IoT research articles. Methods: In this systematic mapping study, the studies published between 2000 and 2018 in major online scientific databases, including IEEE Xplore, Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed were screened. A total of 3679 papers were found from which 89 papers were finally selected based on specific inclusion/exclusion criteria. Results: While the majority of medical IoT studies were experimental and prototyping in nature, they generally reported that home was the most popular place for medical IoT applications. It was also found that neurology, cardiology, and psychiatry/psychology were the medical sub-fields receiving the most IoT attention. Bibliometric analysis showed that IEEE Internet of Things Journal has published the most influential IoT articles. India, China and the United States were found to be the most involved countries in medical IoT research. Conclusions: Although IoT has not yet been employed in some medical sub-fields, recent substantial surge in the number of medical IoT studies will most likely lead to the engagement of more medical sub-fields in the years to come. IoT literature also shows that the ambiguity of assigning a variety of terms to IoT, namely system, platform, device, tool, etc., and the interchangeable uses of these terms require a taxonomy study to investigate the precise definition of these terms. Other areas of research have also been mentioned at the end of this article.