Time to forge ahead: The Internet of Things for healthcare

Situated at the intersection of technology and medicine, the Internet of Things (IoT) holds the promise of addressing some of healthcare's most pressing challenges, from medical error, to chronic drug shortages, to overburdened hospital systems, to dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. However, despite considerable recent technological advances, the pace of successful implementation of promising IoT healthcare initiatives has been slow. To inspire more productive collaboration, we present here a simple-but surprisingly underrated-problem-oriented approach to developing healthcare technologies. To further assist in this effort, we reviewed the various commercial, regulatory, social/cultural, and technological factors in the development of the IoT. We propose that fog computing-a technological paradigm wherein the burden of computing is shifted from a centralized cloud server closer to the data source-offers the greatest promise for building a robust and scalable healthcare IoT ecosystem. To this end, we explore the key enabling technologies that underpin the fog architecture, from the sensing layer all the way up to the cloud. It is our hope that ongoing advances in sensing, communications, cryptography, storage, machine learning, and artificial intelligence will be leveraged in meaningful ways to generate unprecedented medical intelligence and thus drive improvements in the health of many people.