JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Population growth and aging have highlighted the need for more effective home care and prehospital care. Interconnected medical devices and applications, an infrastructure referred to as the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), have enabled remote patient monitoring and can be important tools to cope with these demographic changes. However, developing IoMT platforms requires profound knowledge about clinical needs and challenges related to interoperability and how these can be managed with suitable technologies.

Objective:

The purpose of this scoping review is to summarize the best practices and technologies used to overcome interoperability concerns in IoMT platform development for medical emergencies in home care and prehospital care.

Methods:

This scoping review will be conducted in accordance with Arksey and O’Malley’s five-stage framework. Only peer-reviewed articles published in English will be considered. The databases/web search engines that will be used are IEEE Xplore, PubMed, Scopus, Google Scholar, National Center for Biotechnology Information, SAGE journals and ScienceDirect. The search process for relevant literature will be divided into four different steps. This will ensure that a suitable approach is followed in terms of search terms, limitations and eligibility criteria. Relevant articles that meet the inclusion criteria will be screened in two stages: abstract and title screening and full-text screening.

Results:

The results of the preliminary searches indicate that there is sufficient literature to form a good foundation for the scoping review. The main clinical focus is the prevention and management of falls, and other medical emergencies, such as heart disease and stroke, are also considered.

Conclusions:

This scoping review will provide insights and recommendations regarding how interoperable real-time IoMT platforms can be developed to handle medical emergencies in home care and prehospital care. The findings of this research could be used by researchers, clinicians, and implementation teams and facilitate future development and interdisciplinary discussions.