Opportunities and challenges of the Internet of Things for healthcare: Systems engineering perspective

In the incoming world of Internet of Things (IoT) for healthcare, different distributed devices will gather, analyze and communicate real time medical information to open, private or hybrid clouds, making it possible to collect, store and analyze big data streams in several new forms, and activate context dependent alarms. This innovative data acquisition paradigm allows continuous and ubiquitous medical data access from any connected device over the Internet, and a novel health application ecosystem emerges. In these complex ecosystems could be insufficient to discuss only classical requirements regarding hardware issues and software support of individual elements. In the involved multidisciplinary development area, with intricate vertical and horizontal markets, it is essential a close collaboration between the corresponding stakeholders: endusers, application domain experts, hardware designers, software developers, market specialists, road mapping strategists and even the collaboration of visionaries to implement successful healthcare ecosystems. In this paper we describe some crucial systems engineering viewpoints to analyse the corresponding complex decision space. We complement the general examination of the IoT space by commenting some particular examples and specific details, which correspond to remarkable options of the involved dimensions.