The Use of IoT and Technology in E-mental Health: Literature Review

Today, the Internet of Things has become a megatrend in the next-generation technologies impacting every sector of the economy. The Internet of Things, which interconnects identifiable smart devices and objects within the internet's infrastructure, has enormous benefits which are advanced through the connectivity of these devices, the services they offer, as well as the systems they build (Del Giudice, 2016; Joyia et al., 2017). Internet of things can be implemented in various domains such as security, industrial control, emergency services, structural health, congestion of traffic, and health care to provide the required automation (Li, Da Xu, & Zhao, 2015). Some domains like the healthcare are always critical. Thus, the governments must carefully evaluate various factors before they can successfully implement them in their respective countries. According to Ahmadi et al., (2018), a successful implementation of the Internet of Things technologies in healthcare requires the governments to consider a wide range of successful elements such as vision and strategy, research and development, stakeholders of private as well as the public sectors, governance, policy, and procedure, and many others before they can successfully adopt and implement these technologies. The healthcare sector is one of the most attractive application areas of the technology because of its potential (Islam et al., 2015; Joyia et al., 2017; Razzaque et al., 2016; Wasankar, Gulhane, & L, 2017). In healthcare, the technology has been successfully implemented in remote health monitoring, elderly care, fitness programs, and in the diagnosis of the chronic diseases (Hassanalieragh et al., 2015).

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In e-mental health service, the Internet of Things has been applied in compliance with treatment as well as in the provision of medications by the healthcare providers. The technology has been widely used in the e-mental health services due to the critical nature of the mental health as it involves emotions, psychology, and social well-being of an individual. Thus, the medical devices, the diagnostic tools, and the sensors used in the e-mental health services must be compliant with all the key elements considered before adopting the Internet of things technologies. The use of IoT-based e-mental health in various healthcare facilities have significantly reduced cost, enriched the experience of the users, and increased the quality of lives of the individuals by keeping them in check and reporting any slight divergence from the standard mental health status (Ruiz-Rosero, 2017). The Internet of Things has also been successfully implemented in monitoring the mental health status remotely thus identifying the optimum times when an individual is experiencing stressful situations and provide the appropriate remedies that an individual can implement to get a solution to his or her problem (Hassanalieragh et al., 2015). In mental e-health, the Internet of Things has also been implemented by the psychologists in scheduling their limited resources to ensure they provide the best services to their patients. They have used the technology for monitoring and controlling the actions of the patients avoiding the situations and conditions which might affect their mental health as a result. The use of IoT in the e-mental health services has eased the costs of the interaction between the patients, the mental health specialists, clinics, and other healthcare organizations. The eased interaction between these stakeholders has enabled the creation of a universal health database which has played a vital role in delivering the on-demand services to the patients.

The field of Internet of Things has attracted much attention from the researchers in the healthcare sector through practical challenges. As a result, the researchers have come up with numerous services, applications, as well as prototypes for various departments in the sector. According to Dimitrov (2016), network architectures and platforms, security, and interoperability of these systems and applications in collecting the big data that could be used in revolutionizing the healthcare industry have brought about various research trends in the field (Whitmore, Agarwal, & Da Xu, 2015). The increasing research and development that has continually taken place in the field have led to the formulation of policies as well as guidelines to be used in the deployment as well as the use of the Internet of Things in the healthcare sector (Al-Fuqaha et al., 2015). Nonetheless, within the healthcare sector, the use of Internet of Things in the field of mental health has not been extensively explored. The use of Internet of Things in the healthcare sector has majorly been tailored to solve the problems focusing on the rising medical costs, shortages of resources experienced in the healthcare sector and the problems experienced by the aging population. Various research that has been undertaken on the use of Internet of Things technologies in the healthcare sector have revolved around the homecare services which aims to provide services to the chronically ill, disabled, and the aged family (Stankovic, 2014).

The Internet of Things technologies used in implementing the health care based applications and services runs on the cloud-based architectures which provides much scalability and flexibilities has enabled a full realization of the potential of Internet of Things and its benefits in the healthcare sector (Botta et al., 2014 ). The communication between the Internet of Things devices has also been enabled by the use of communication technologies such as the wireless fidelity, radio-frequency identification, Bluetooth, Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks, and ZigBee which have been implemented in the various models of the Internet of Things. Despite the use of these technologies, the research has not much explored the security and interoperability of these technologies when implemented along the devices within the Internet of Things set up in the healthcare sector, thus raising the question of privacy and security of the critical patient information. Nonetheless, these technologies have greatly improved the healthcare services in the respective departments of the healthcare sector where they have been implemented by improving the information exchange within the departments thus reducing the healthcare costs and the hospitalization stay duration.

According to Hu, Xie, and Shen (2013), Internet of Things technology makes use of the smart objects which are the most basic building blocks when developing the cyber-physical smart framework which is used in the e-mental health systems. Ahmadi et al., (2018), surveyed the advances that have been made on the Internet of Things based healthcare facilities by reviewing their state of the art applications, platforms, the industry trends, the network architecture, as well as the Internet of Things based solutions in various departments of the facility (Mi et al., 2016; Whitmore, Agarwal, & Da Xu, 2015). The research paper focused on the analysis of the privacy as well as the security features which included the threat models, the security requirements, and the attack taxonomies experienced on the systems in place from the healthcare perspective. The paper proposed an intelligent model of security aimed at minimizing risks. They further discussed the ways through which the emerging technologies such as the ambient intelligence, big data, and wearable can be leveraged and incorporated in the context of the healthcare which could address various policies relating to eHealth and Internet of things (Firouzi, 2018; Gubbi 2013). The paper also discussed the effects of these regulations on their effects on the existing societies and economies providing the avenues for future research on the challenges faced by the IoT based healthcare.

Conclusion

Therefore, due to the nature of the nature of IoT technology, which has continued to influence the daily lives of individuals, the economies across the globe, and the business world, it is important for the governments to carefully evaluate the key elements such as the vision and strategy, the governance, the policy and the procedure, the research and development, the targeted individuals and many others before implementing such technologies. Evaluation of these elements by the government is also important since the IoT integrates electronic devices which collects personal and private data which ought to be secure. Having the appropriate vision and strategy will ensure that the IoT technology is purposefully implemented to the appropriate individuals using the right and recommended IoT tools. The personnel to be in charge of these IoT devices, systems and applications must also be given adequate training by the government in line with the IoT policies in place to ensure their operations are in line with the existing procedures, guidelines, and policies (Yuehong et al., 2016). The government also need to invest in research and development to ensure the use of Internet of Things in the healthcare sector is extensively explored. The devices used in e-mental health IoT technologies such as sensors can generate a lot of big data about themselves, the surroundings, and the patients who use them (Rahmani et al., 2015). These data, as well as those who access them remotely, need to be controlled making the successful elements very essential in the use of IoT and Technology in implementing the e-mental health systems.

References

Ahmadi, H., Arji, G., Shahmoradi, L., Safdari, R., Nilashi, M., & Alizadeh, M. (2018). The application of internet of things in healthcare: a systematic literature review and classification. Universal Access in the Information Society, 1-33.

Al-Fuqaha, A., Guizani, M., Mohammadi, M., Aledhari, M., & Ayyash, M. (2015). Internet of things: A survey on enabling technologies, protocols, and applications. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 17(4), 2347-2376.

Botta, A., Donato, W.D., Persico, V., & Pescape, A. (2014). On the Integration of Cloud Computing and Internet of Things. 2014 International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud, 23-30.

Del Giudice, M. (2016). Discovering the Internet of Things (IoT): technology and business process management, inside and outside the innovative firms. Business Process Management Journal, 22(2). https://doi.org/10.1108/BPMJ-02-2016-0029Dimitrov, D. V. (2016). Medical internet of things and big data in healthcare. Healthcare informatics research, 22(3), 156-163.

Firouzi, F., Rahmani, A. M., Mankodiya, K., Badaroglu, M., Merrett, G. V., Wong, P., & Farahani, B. (2018). Internet-of-Things and big data for smarter healthcare: From device to architecture, applications, and analytics.

Gubbi, J., Buyya, R., Marusic, S., & Palaniswami, M. (2013). Internet of Things (IoT): A Vision, Architectural Elements, and Future Directions. Future Generation Comp. Syst., 29, 1645-1660.

Hassanalieragh, M., Page, A., Soyata, T., Sharma, G., Aktas, M., Mateos, G., ... & Andreescu, S. (2015). Health monitoring and management using Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensing with cloud-based processing: Opportunities and challenges. In Services Computing (SCC), 2015 IEEE International Conference on (pp. 285-292). IEEE.

Hu, F., Xie, D., & Shen, S. (2013). On the Application of the Internet of Things in the Field of Medical and Health Care. 2013 IEEE International Conference on Green Computing and Communications and IEEE Internet of Things and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing, 2053-2058.

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