Wireless Communication Protocols for Internet of Medical Things Applications: An Exploration of Practical Use-Case Scenarios

The implementation of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) in telemedicine necessitates the deployment of various medical devices, including wearable and implantable sensors, in a network to collect diverse categories of medical data, resulting in the accumulation of large data volumes. The interoperability of these IoMT devices and networks determines to what extent the devices and networks can exchange and interpret medical data. The lack of standardised communication protocols for sharing medical data between individual devices and networks remains a serious challenge that needs to be addressed to unravel the potential of healthcare information sharing using IoMT. This article presents an exploration of practicable IoMT communication protocols to identify possible means of enabling cross-platform interoperability between devices and networks. Taxonomy of IoMT-based telemedicine communication protocols with use-case examples leveraging a large number of existing works of literature, have been examined. The use of open API, gateways and microservices for effective cross-platform medical data sharing is common due to the lack of standard communication protocols. Standardisation of IoMT communication protocols is possible by adopting the most effective open-source communication protocol such as the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) Protocol.