The Future of eHealth: Applications, Solutions, and New Visions in the IoT Era

The employment of digital technologies and new paradigms are opening the doors to innovative prospects for the future of eHealth worldwide. Traditional Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) are evolving into molecular communications, and artificially created boundaries between medicine and ICT will be removed in order to take advantage of the new opportunity to dramatically improve the precision of medical diagnosis and therapeutics. The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is emerging as one of the most trending topics of technology in recent years since it gives rise to a number of trends and services related to different scenarios. Therefore, thanks to its multidisciplinary approach, IoT is actually revolutionizing many aspects of traditional healthcare paradigms since traditional healthcare systems can no longer satisfy the needs of a continuously growing and developing society. Indeed, nowadays, the world needs to face the aging of the population and the inherent need of assisted-living environments for elderly people. The goal of this Feature Topic (FT) is to publish innovative IoT solutions for eHealth, bringing together researchers from academia into a common platform to advance the state-of-the-art of eHealth by eliciting new applications and disruptive solutions for medical science and healthcare. The theme of this FT is three-fold: i) to discuss the latest advancements in the field of IoT for eHealth by presenting innovative and efficient solutions; ii) to illustrate aspects of applying IoT in healthcare experimental results to analyze the effects over lifestyle and healthcare systems and the response to technology-assisted medical care and treatments; and iii) to give further directions for research, new problems and challenges in eHealth.