The impact of the hybrid platform of internet of things and cloud computing on healthcare systems: opportunities, challenges, and open problems

Cloud Computing (CC) and the Internet of Things (IoT) have emerged as new platforms in the ICT revolution of the twenty-first century. The adoption of the CloudIoT paradigm in the healthcare field can bring several opportunities to medical IT, and experts believe that it can significantly improve healthcare services and contribute to its continuous and systematic innovation. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the current literature on integration of CC and IoT to solving various problems in healthcare applications such as smart hospitals, medicine control, and remote medical services. Also, a brief introduction to cloud computing and internet of things with an application to health care is given. This paper presents a new concept of the integration of CC and IoT for healthcare applications, which is what we; call the CloudIoT-Health paradigm. The term CloudIoT-Health and some key integration issues are presented in this paper to offer a practical vision to integrate current components of CC and the IoT in healthcare applications. Also, this paper aims to present the state of the art and gap analysis of different levels of integration components, analyzing different existing proposals in CloudIoT-Health systems. Finally, related researches of CC and IoT integration for healthcare systems have been reviewed. Challenges to be addressed and future directions of research are identified, and an extensive bibliography is presented.