Internet of things in health: Requirements, issues, and gaps.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has been extensively applied to several sectors in the last years, ranging from industry to smart cities. In the health domain, IoT makes possible new scenarios of healthcare delivery as well as collecting and processing health data in real time from sensors in order to make informed decisions. However, this domain is complex and presents several technological challenges. Despite the extensive literature about this topic, the application of IoT in healthcare scarcely covers requirements of this sector. METHODS: A literature review from January 2010 to February 2021 was performed resulting in 12,108 articles. After filtering by title, abstract, and content, 86 were eligible and examined according to three requirement themes: data lifecycle; trust, security, and privacy; and human-related issues. RESULTS: The analysis of the reviewed literature shows that most approaches consider IoT application in healthcare merely as in any other domain (industry, smart cities…), with no regard of the specific requirements of this domain. CONCLUSIONS: Future efforts in this matter should be aligned with the specific requirements and needs of the health domain, so that exploiting the capabilities of the IoT paradigm may represent a meaningful step forward in the application of this technology in healthcare.

User-centred design for developing e-Health system for renal patients at home (AppNephro).

BACKGROUND: Despite the promising benefits of the e-Health approaches (including provide technology-based healthcare services to anyone, anytime, and anywhere), few solutions are adopted in daily practice. User acceptance is one of the major obstacles that hinder the success of technology approaches. End-users often stress misalignments among their problems and the solutions that technology systems aim to solve. In other cases, systems developed are unfriendly or unadjusted to the daily practice of clinicians or patient's life. To maximize user acceptance, the relevance of adopting user-centred design and development techniques is well-known. However, users are often assumed to be a homogeneous group with the same set of requirements, what leads to an ineffective identification and addressment of user requirements. Furthermore, usability and accessibility issues must be carefully addressed to guarantee also the right alignment of solutions with user needs. OBJECTIVE: to develop an e-Health system for renal patients at home by adopting user-centred design practices, usability and accessibility standards. MATERIAL AND METHODS: users were categorized in four different groups (i.e., digital patients/caregivers, non-digital patients/caregivers, clinicians and nurses) and a sample was included in the design and development team. Questionnaires and interviews were used to identify user requirements and assess prototypes. RESULTS: Requirements were considered for every kind of user, what resulted on a multi-faceted e-Health system implying different technologies and functionalities regarding to each target user. CONCLUSION: Identification and continuous involvement of all kind of users allow their needs to be properly understood and addressed by technology, raising user acceptance of the final product.

Ambient assisted living: a methodological approach.

In this paper, the most important challenges and trends related to the application of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) methods and techniques to the social/healthcare context are discussed. In order to find out technical solutions to these challenges, the main methodological issues concerning the design of open and distributed architectures are analyzed. The objective is to improve the efficiency/cost ratio in the provision of social and healthcare services to citizens with special needs, through the application of new paradigms in the context of AAL environments. Finally, some results and conclusions regarding the proposed open architecture are illustrated for the case of a distributed biomedical sensor network designed by the authors following this methodology.