Role of emerging technologies in future IoT-driven Healthcare 4.0 technologies: a survey, current challenges and future directions

Since its inception, Healthcare 4.0 has empowered the integration of advanced technologies to create and improve the quality of healthcare services. The delivery of healthcare services has come a long way from physical appointments with doctors to remote health monitoring and disease prediction, surgery assistive systems. This advancement has only been possible because of the integration of cutting-edge technologies like Tele-healthcare, software-defined networking and many more, with healthcare systems. In this survey, we have targeted some of the pioneering research works that could contribute significantly to the future development of Healthcare 4.0 systems. We have identified the significant research gaps and presented the modern state-of-the-art of healthcare systems, introducing the Healthcare IoT Application and Service Stacks. We have also discussed the latest paradigm of Wireless Body Area Networks, emphasizing its significance and how it can contribute to the development of next-generation healthcare applications using emerging technologies like Machine Learning, Blockchain, Cloud Computing, Internet of things, Edge/ Fog Computing, Tele-healthcare, Big Data Analytics, Software-Defined Networking and many more. We have performed a comparative study of different architectural implementations considering their advantages, shortcomings, and quality-of-service requirements. We emphasize the importance of the different emerging technologies in detail, discussing the opportunities available and their potential to create better healthcare solutions that can provide superior service quality. Finally, we highlight the fundamental need for establishing security and privacy in future healthcare systems. Overall, this survey provides a strong outlook into the development of the future of healthcare 4.0.