Exploratory Analysis of Internet of Things (IoT) in Healthcare: A Topic Modeling Approach

Abstract

The rapid integration of the physical and cyber worlds through the Internet of Things, or IoTs, is transforming our lives in ways that we could not have imagined even five years ago. Although they are still in their infancy, IoTs have already made a significant impact, particularly in the healthcare domain. The purpose of this study is to unravel key themes latent in the sparse but growing academic literature on the application of IoTs in healthcare. Specifically, we performed topic modeling and identified five dominant clusters of research, namely, privacy and security, wireless network technologies, applications, data, and smart health and cloud. Our results show that research in healthcare IoT has mainly focused on the technical aspects with little attention to social concerns. In addition to categorizing and discussing the topics identified, the paper provides directions for future research