Exploring internet of healthcare things for establishing an integrated care link system in the healthcare industry

With the ageing population all over the world, long-term care services, such as nursing care, are essential to provide care and treatments to elderly patients in the community. During the nursing care services, elderly patients who live in the nursing homes require to be treated and consulted in a number of healthcare organisations, for example hospitals, mental health centres and rehabilitation centres. Currently, the data management for the elderly is relatively centralised to establish their own electronic medical records and protected health information without decision support functionalities. The community and healthcare industry are eager to develop a safe and comprehensive system to provide adequate healthcare services and monitoring to the elderly. In this study, an internet of healthcare things (IoHT)-based care link system (IoHT-CLS) is proposed, which provides a structured framework on integrating IoHT and artificial intelligence (AI) to generate a one-stop solution for managing elderly’s healthcare facilities. The elderly can be effectively linked into the integrated IoHT system by using various sensing and data collection technologies. The collected data are further processed by means of the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system and case-based reasoning to provide the functionalities of risk management and customised elderly service programmes for the elderly care institutions. Consequently, this study contributes to the healthcare management through the enhancement of service quality in the community.