Thanks to the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT), pervasive healthcare is gaining popularity day by day as it offers health support to patients irrespective of their location. In emergency medical situations, medical aid can be sent quickly. Though not yet standardized, this research direction, healthcare Internet of Things (H-IoT), attracts the attention of the research community, both academia and industry. In this article, we conduct a comprehensive survey of pervasive computing H-IoT. We would like to visit the wide range of applications. We provide a broad vision of key components, their roles, and connections in the big picture. We classify the vast amount of publications into different categories such as sensors, communication, artificial intelligence, infrastructure, and security. Intensively covering 118 research works, we survey (1) applications, (2) key components, their roles and connections, and (3) the challenges. Our survey also discusses the potential solutions to overcome the challenges in this research field.
The application of chest X-ray imaging for early disease screening is attracting interest from the computer vision and deep learning community. To date, various deep learning models have been applied in X-ray image analysis. However, models perform inconsistently depending on the dataset. In this paper, we consider each individual model as a medical doctor. We then propose a doctor consultation-inspired method that fuses multiple models. In particular, we consider both early and late fusion mechanisms for consultation. The early fusion mechanism combines the deep learned features from multiple models, whereas the late fusion method combines the confidence scores of all individual models. Experiments on two X-ray imaging datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method relative to baseline. The experimental results also show that early consultation consistently outperforms the late consultation mechanism in both benchmark datasets. In particular, the early doctor consultation-inspired model outperforms all individual models by a large margin, i.e., 3.03 and 1.86 in terms of accuracy in the UIT COVID-19 and chest X-ray datasets, respectively.
25 August 2025 in Computers in Biology and Medicine