Smart healthcare

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) era promises hundreds of billions of devices or physical objects connected to the Internet. These objects include sensors, actuators, and processing elements that help us gather data, make intelligent decisions, and optimize processes. IoT is expected to have a potential economic impact of $3–6 trillion per year by 2025, with $1–2.5 trillion of this economic impact (its largest fraction) coming from smart healthcare applications. These applications will be enabled by wearable medical sensors (WMSs) that will transmit their information to a personal health hub, such as a smartphone or smartwatch. The sensors and the health hub form a body-area network (BAN). The BAN will communicate with a health server over the Internet, making a complete personal healthcare system possible. The doctors can communicate with the health server to keep track of an individual's health. However, many challenges remain in making this vision a reality.