Innovations in health care and the internet of things (IoT): An overview of technological and scientific research

ABSTRACT

This study provides an analysis of the scientific and technological research on the applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) within the field of health care. It focuses on innovations and is based on scientific articles and patent documentation. The search for data, which was global in scope, was based on specific criteria and enabled a mapping of 217 articles and 117 patents involving the IoT applied to health care over the last 10 years. Bibliometric analysis was applied to the data, followed by content analysis. The analyses applied herein identified the most productive authors (Lotka’s law), their affiliations, the distribution of publications over time, the core journals in which this topic is distributed (Bradford’s law), the predominant approaches used in the publications (Zipf’s law), and the countries and regions in which this scientific and technological research is most commonly performed. This topic was found to have been most heavily researched since 2010, and this research is led by countries in Asia. Scientific research on this topic is predominantly affiliated with universities, while technological research on this topic is more likely to be affiliated with corporations, though their discussions and conclusions are consistent. Among the topics of study identified, the most frequent was the remote monitoring of patients.

Keywords:
Innovation; Health care; The Internet of things; Scientific research; Technological development