Use of Internet of Things for Chronic Disease Management: An Overview

Most of the countries with elderly populations are currently facing with chronic diseases. In this regard, Internet of Things (IoT) technology offers promising tools for reducing the chronic disease burdens. Despite the presence of fruitful works on the use of IoT for chronic disease management in literature, these are rarely overviewed consistently. The present study provides an overview on the use of IoT for chronic disease management, followed by ranking different chronic diseases based on their priority for using IoT in the developing countries. For this purpose, a structural coding was used to provide a list of technologies adopted so far, and then latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm was applied to find major topics in literature. In order to rank chronic diseases based on their priority for using IoT, a list of common categories of chronic diseases was subjected to fuzzy analytic hierarchy process. The research findings include lists of IoT technologies for chronic disease management and the most-discussed chronic diseases. In addition, with the help of text mining, a total of 18 major topics were extracted from the relevant pieces of literature. The results indicated that the cardiovascular disease and to a slightly lesser extent, diabetes mellitus are of the highest priorities for using IoT in the context of developing countries.