As COVID-19 hounds the world, the common cause of finding a swift solution to manage the pandemic has brought together researchers, institutions, governments, and society at large. The Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI)—including machine learning (ML) and Big Data analytics—as well as Robotics and Blockchain, are the four decisive areas of technological innovation that have been ingenuity harnessed to fight this pandemic and future ones. While these highly interrelated smart and connected health technologies cannot resolve the pandemic overnight and may not be the only answer to the crisis, they can provide greater insight into the disease and support frontline efforts to prevent and control the pandemic. This article provides a blend of discussions on the contribution of these digital technologies, propose several complementary and multidisciplinary techniques to combat COVID-19, offer opportunities for more holistic studies, and accelerate knowledge acquisition and scientific discoveries in pandemic research. First, four areas, where IoT can contribute are discussed, namely: 1) tracking and tracing; 2) remote patient monitoring (RPM) by wearable IoT (WIoT); 3) personal digital twins (PDTs); and 4) real-life use case: ICT/IoT solution in South Korea. Second, the role and novel applications of AI are explained, namely: 1) diagnosis and prognosis; 2) risk prediction; 3) vaccine and drug development; 4) research data set; 5) early warnings and alerts; 6) social control and fake news detection; and 7) communication and chatbot. Third, the main uses of robotics and drone technology are analyzed, including: 1) crowd surveillance; 2) public announcements; 3) screening and diagnosis; and 4) essential supply delivery. Finally, we discuss how distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), of which blockchain is a common example, can be combined with other technologies for tackling COVID-19.

The digital transformation is characterized by the convergence of technologies—from the Internet of Things (IoT) to edge–fog–cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and Blockchain—in multiple dimensions, blurring the lines between the physical and digital worlds. Although these innovations have evolved independently over time, they are increasingly becoming more intertwined, driving the development of new business models. With more adaptation, embracement, and development, we are witnessing a steady convergence and fusion of these technologies resulting in an unprecedented paradigm shift that is expected to disrupt and reshape the next-generation systems in vertical domains in a way that the capabilities of the technologies are aligned in the best possible way to complement each other. Despite the fact that the convergence of the four technologies can potentially tackle the main shortcomings of the existing systems, its adoption is still in its infancy phase, suffering from several issues, such as the absence of consensus toward any reference models or best practices. This article provides a comprehensive insight into the fusions of these paradigms by discussing a blend of topics addressing all the importation aspects from design to deployment. We will begin this article by providing an in-depth discussion on the main requirements, state-of-the-art reference architectures, applications, and challenges. Following this, we will present a reference architecture and a case study on privacy-preserving stress monitoring and management to better elaborate on the corresponding details and considerations.

The interaction between technology and healthcare has a long history. However, recent years have witnessed the rapid growth and adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, the advent of miniature wearable biosensors, and research advances in Big Data techniques for effective manipulation of large, multiscale, multimodal, distributed and heterogeneous data sets. These advances have generated new opportunities for personalized precision eHealth and mHealth services. IoT heralds a paradigm shift in the healthcare horizon by providing many advantages, including availability and accessibility, ability to personalize and tailor content, and cost-effective delivery. Although IoT eHealth has vastly expanded the possibilities to fulfill a number of existing healthcare needs, many challenges must still be addressed in order to develop consistent, suitable, safe, flexible and power-efficient systems that are suitable fit for medical needs. To enable this transformation, it is necessary for a large number of significant technological advancements in the hardware and software communities to come together. This keynote paper addresses all these important aspects of novel IoT technologies for smart healthcare-wearable sensors, body area sensors, advanced pervasive healthcare systems, and Big Data analytics. It identifies new perspectives and highlights compelling research issues and challenges such as scalability, interoperability, device-network-human interfaces, and security, with various case studies. In addition, with the help of examples, we show how knowledge from CAD areas such as large scale analysis and optimization techniques can be applied to the important problems of eHealth.

As the trajectory of the Internet of Things (IoT) moving at a rapid pace and with the rapid worldwide development and public embracement of wearable sensors, these days, most companies and organizations are awash in massive amounts of data. Determining how to profit from data deluge can give companies an edge in the market because data have the potential to add tremendous value to many aspects of a business. The market has already seen a level of monetization across vertical domains in the form of layering connected devices with a variety of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) choices, such as subscription plans or smart device insights. Out of this arena is evolving a “machine economy” in which the ability to correctly monetize data rather than simply hoard it, will provide a significant advantage in a competitive digital environment. The recent advent of the technological advances in the fields of big data, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) has opened new avenues of competition, where data are utilized strategically and treated as a continuously changing asset able to unleash new revenue opportunities for monetization. Such growth has made room for an onslaught of new tools, architectures, business models, platforms, and marketplaces that enable organizations to successfully monetize data. In fact, emerging business models are striving to alter the power balance between users and companies that harvest information. Start-ups and organizations are offering to sell user data to data analytics companies and other businesses. Monetizing data goes beyond just selling data. It is also possible to include steps that add value to data. Generally, organizations can monetize data by: 1) utilizing it to make better business decisions or improve processes; 2) surrounding flagship services or products with data; or 3) selling information to current or new markets. This article will address all important aspects of IoT data monetization with more focus on the healthcare industry and discuss the corresponding challenges, such as data management, scalability, regulations, interoperability, security, and privacy. In addition, it presents a holistic reference architecture for the healthcare data economy with an in-depth case study on the detection and prediction of cardiac anomalies using multiparty computation (MPC) and privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) techniques.

The conventional mental healthcare regime often follows a symptom-focused and episodic approach in a noncontinuous manner, wherein the individual discretely records their biomarker levels or vital signs for a short period prior to a subsequent doctor’s visit. Recognizing that each individual is unique and requires continuous stress monitoring and personally tailored treatment, we propose a holistic hybrid edge–cloud Wearable Internet of Things (WIoT)-based online stress monitoring solution to address the above needs. To eliminate the latency associated with cloud access, appropriate edge models—spiking neural network (SNN), Conditionally Parameterized Convolutions (CondConv), and support vector machine (SVM)—are trained, enabling low-energy real-time stress assessment near the subjects on the spot. This work leverages design-space exploration for the purpose of optimizing the performance and energy efficiency of machine learning inference at the edge. The cloud exploits a novel multimodal matching network model that outperforms six state-of-the-art stress recognition algorithms by 2%–7% in terms of accuracy. An offloading decision process is formulated to strike the right balance between accuracy, latency, and energy. By addressing the interplay of edge–cloud, the proposed hierarchical solution leads to a reduction of 77.89% in response time and 78.56% in energy consumption with only a 7.6% drop in accuracy compared to the Internet of Things (IoT)–Cloud scheme, and it achieves a 5.8% increase in accuracy on average compared to the IoT-Edge scheme.