IoT Use Cases in Healthcare and Tourism

Abstract

Healthcare and tourism are among the fastest growing business domains in the world. These are biggest service industries that affect whole world population and give jobs to millions of people. Recently we witness major changes in both industries, as more services are transferred to small providers, including individual entrepreneurs and SMEs. This process is driven by huge growth in demand, which cannot be fulfilled by applying traditional solutions. The new generation of digital services reshapes landscape of both industries. Some players see it as a threat, as digital services replace their traditional business models. But fighting against progress is useless, especially when you cannot fulfill growing by old means. Internet of Things (IoT) is an integral part of the Future Internet ecosystem that will have major impact on development of healthcare and e-Tourism services. IoT provides an infrastructure to uniquely identify and link physical objects to their virtual representations in Internet. As a result any physical object can have virtual reflection in the service space. This gives an opportunity to replace actions on physical objects by operations on their virtual reflections, which can be done much faster, cheaper and more comfortable for people. This provides a huge space for developing and applying new business models. In this paper we summarize research and development results of IoT studies and discuss ideas on how to apply them to business.