Healthcare Internet of Things: Security Threats, Challenges, and Future Research Directions

Internet of Things (IoT) applications are switching from general to precise in different industries, e.g., healthcare, automation, military, maritime, smart cities, transportation, logistics, and many more. In the healthcare domain, these applications have demonstrated an incredible improvement in patient assessment, monitoring, prescription, etc., with ease of access through the Internet. Despite its benefits, this technology also offers several security challenges for the research community and healthcare stakeholders, because of its wireless communication and open-area deployment. To explore, patient wearable devices and other networking entities follow unstructured communication format to share their accumulated data in the network, which makes them susceptible to manifold security threats. Considering the significance of these applications, data acquisition, processing, storage, and assessment on client and remote sides need a high standard of secure communication infrastructure. Therefore, security of these applications is one of the major obstacles that prevent their widespread use in different healthcare domains. To discuss different security constraints, in this article, we present a comprehensive survey of the theoretical literature from 2015 to 2023 to highlight the unresolved security problems of this emerging technology. Based on the evaluated literature pros and cons, we determine the security requirements and challenges of Healthcare-IoT (HC-IoT) applications. Following this, we demonstrate future research directions that could be useful for the researchers and industry stakeholders working in this domain. To demonstrate the uniqueness of this work and claim its contribution, we compare our work section-wise with previously published papers to answer the question of reviewers, editors, students, and readers, why this review article is required in the presence of already published review articles.