Wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT), Applications, Opportunities, and Challenges: A Survey

Smart wearables collect and analyze data, and in some scenarios make a smart decision and provide a response to the user and are finding more and more applications in our daily life. In this paper, we comprehensively survey the most recent and important research works conducted in the area of wearable Internet of Things (IoT) and classify the wearables into four major clusters: (i) health, (ii) sports and daily activity, (iii) tracking and localization, and (iv) safety. The fundamental differences of the algorithms associated within each cluster are grouped and analyzed and the research challenges and open issues in each cluster are discussed. This survey reveals that although Cellular IoT (CIoT) has many advantages and can bring enormous applications to IoT wearables, it has been rarely studied by the researchers. This article also addresses the opportunities and challenges related to implementing CIoT-enabled wearables.