Feasibility of Internet of Things application for real-time healthcare for Malaysian pilgrims

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) technology could be an effective solution to accomplish real-time retrieval of historical electronic health records (EHRs) to present better service of healthcare. In a pilgrimage environment such as the Hajj, IoT can be applied by identifying the non-local patients as electronic tags, and the tag data can be read by wireless sensors. The data that is collected using Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) can be acquired from a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) in order to accomplish many decisions, such as sending an ambulance to a patient's location, sending an emergency alert to his immediate family circle, and retrieving his EHR from a database. The main contribution of this research is to propose a conceptual IoT framework relevant to support the non-local patients through retrieval of EHR between countries via internet network. The conceptual framework based on four layers (connectivity, access, abstraction and service) is proposed to show how the IoT can be a solution for the case study. The validation results show that the proposed framework is useful to serve the health cases of Malaysian pilgrims. Copyright © 2019 American Scientific Publishers All rights reserved.