Healthcare is a field that is rapidly developing in technology and services. A recent development in this area is remote monitoring of patients which has many advantages in a fast aging world population with increasing health complications. With relatively simple applications to monitor patients inside hospital rooms, the technology has developed to the extent that the patient can be allowed normal daily activities at home while still being monitored with the use of modern communication and sensor technologies. Sensors for monitoring essential vital signs such as electrocardiogram reading, heart rate, respiration rate, blood pressure, temperature, blood glucose levels and neural system activity are available today. Range of remote healthcare varies from monitoring chronically ill patients, elders, premature children to victims of accidents. These new technologies can monitor patients based on the illness or based on the situation. The technology varies from sensors attached to body to ambient sensors attached to the environment and new breakthroughs show contactless monitoring which requires only the patient to be present within a few meters from the sensor. Fall detection systems and applications to monitor chronical ill patients have already become familiar to many. This study provides a review of the recent advances in remote healthcare and monitoring in both with-contact and contactless methods. With the review, the authors discuss some issues available in most systems. The paper also includes some directions for future research.

The reliability of delivering packets through multi-hop intermediate nodes is a significant issue in the mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The distributed mobile nodes establish connections to form the MANET, which may include selfish and misbehaving nodes. Recommendation based trust management has been proposed in the literature as a mechanism to filter out the misbehaving nodes while searching for a packet delivery route. However, building a trust model that adopts recommendations by other nodes in the network is a challenging problem due to the risk of dishonest recommendations like bad-mouthing, ballot-stuffing, and collusion. This paper investigates the problems related to attacks posed by misbehaving nodes while propagating recommendations in the existing trust models. We propose a recommendation based trust model with a defence scheme, which utilises clustering technique to dynamically filter out attacks related to dishonest recommendations between certain time based on number of interactions, compatibility of information and closeness between the nodes. The model is empirically tested under several mobile and disconnected topologies in which nodes experience changes in their neighbourhood leading to frequent route changes. The empirical analysis demonstrates robustness and accuracy of the trust model in a dynamic MANET environment.