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.

The technology and healthcare industries have been deeply intertwined for quite some time. New opportunities, however, are now arising as a result of fast-paced expansion in the areas of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data. In addition, as people across the globe have begun to adopt wearable biosensors, new applications for individualized eHealth and mHealth technologies have emerged. The upsides of these technologies are clear: they are highly available, easily accessible, and simple to personalize; additionally they make it easy for providers to deliver individualized content cost-effectively, at scale. At the same time, a number of hurdles currently stand in the way of truly reliable, adaptive, safe and efficient personal healthcare devices. Major technological milestones will need to be reached in order to address and overcome those hurdles; and that will require closer collaboration between hardware and software developers and medical personnel such as physicians, nurses, and healthcare workers. The purpose of this special issue is to analyze the top concerns in IoT technologies that pertain to smart sensors for health care applications; particularly applications targeted at individualized tele-health interventions with the goal of enabling healthier ways of life. These applications include wearable and body sensors, advanced pervasive healthcare systems, and the Big Data analytics required to inform these devices.

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