A Structured approach for describing healthcare applications for the Internet of Things

Applications for the Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare have been widely forecast, investigated, and even deployed on a small scale. But most of this work is scattered about a few random applications. In this paper we present a structured approach for describing IoTs for healthcare by defining general classes of system types, classifying the healthcare delivery settings, then using a structured approach to describing the elements for a particular use case. We illustrate the approach for three use cases and discuss certain issues that arise. A brief survey of related work is also given. We conclude that for healthcare applications, domain understanding and inter-professional collaboration are critical to developing realistic use cases.