The Internet of Things (IoT) has been identified in various applications across different domains, such as in the healthcare sector. IoT has also been recognised for its revolution in reshaping modern healthcare with aspiring wide range prospects, including economical, technological and social. This study aims to establish IoT-based smart home security solutions for real-time health monitoring technologies in telemedicine architecture. A multilayer taxonomy is driven and conducted in this study. In the first layer, a comprehensive analysis on telemedicine, which focuses on the client and server sides, shows that other studies associated with IoT-based smart home applications have several limitations that remain unaddressed. Particularly, remote patient monitoring in healthcare applications presents various facilities and benefits by adopting IoT-based smart home technologies without compromising the security requirements and potentially large number of risks. An extensive search is conducted to identify articles that handle these issues, related applications are comprehensively reviewed and a coherent taxonomy for these articles is established. A total number of (n = 3064) are gathered between 2007 and 2017 for most reliable databases, such as ScienceDirect, Web of Science and Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineer Xplore databases. Then, the articles based on IoT studies that are associated with telemedicine applications are filtered. Nine articles are selected and classified into two categories. The first category, which accounts for 22.22% (n = 2/9), includes surveys on telemedicine articles and their applications. The second category, which accounts for 77.78% (n = 7/9), includes articles on the client and server sides of telemedicine architecture. The collected studies reveal the essential requirement in constructing another taxonomy layer and review IoT-based smart home security studies. Therefore, IoT-based smart home security features are introduced and analysed in the second layer. The security of smart home design based on IoT applications is an aspect that represents a crucial matter for general occupants of smart homes, in which studies are required to provide a better solution with patient security, privacy protection and security of users’ entities from being stolen or compromised. Innovative technologies have dispersed limitations related to this matter. The existing gaps and trends in this area should be investigated to provide valuable visions for technical environments and researchers. Thus, 67 articles are obtained in the second layer of our taxonomy and are classified into six categories. In the first category, 25.37% (n = 17/67) of the articles focus on architecture design. In the second category, 17.91% (n = 12/67) includes security analysis articles that investigate the research status in the security area of IoT-based smart home applications. In the third category, 10.44% (n = 7/67) includes articles about security schemes. In the fourth category, 17.91% (n = 12/67) comprises security examination. In the fifth category, 13.43% (n = 9/67) analyses security protocols. In the final category, 14.92% (n = 10/67) analyses the security framework. Then, the identified basic characteristics of this emerging field are presented and provided in the following aspects. Open challenges experienced on the development of IoT-based smart home security are addressed to be adopted fully in telemedicine applications. Then, the requirements are provided to increase researcher’s interest in this study area. On this basis, a number of recommendations for different parties are described to provide insights on the next steps that should be considered to enhance the security of smart homes based on IoT. A map matching for both taxonomies is developed in this study to determine the novel risks and benefits of IoT-based smart home security for real-time remote health monitoring within client and server sides in telemedicine applications.
