Over the past few years we have witnessed the transition of the Internet of Things (IoT) from research into its theory towards its practical application in our daily lives. It provides a mechanism for analyzing both real-time data and past data, in which emerging artificial intelligence and data mining techniques play a key role.

Although there is an increasing interest in applying the IoT in healthcare applications, there are still many challenges, such as finding ‘kits’ of IoT devices that could properly monitor a patient’s activity and track certain symptoms. For example, a kit may include presence sensors, a camera with automatic detection of human movements, and a smart band; and this kit could track loss of memory and existence of hand tremors. The security of the IoT for handling healthcare data in wireless communications should be properly ensured, and new light-weight security mechanisms could be proposed.

New collaboration mechanisms in IoT devices could improve the current state-of-the-art in the IoT for healthcare, using wireless communications or mobile computing (WCMC). For example, the collaborative IoT could allow several IoT devices to share information about a patient from different sources, providing a reliable diagnosis or a customized service. Some examples of healthcare issues that could be addressed with the IoT are smart beds for the alerting of dangerous sleeping postures in both elder people and premature infants; IoT pill dispensers that warn caregivers if a patient forgets to take their medication; and smart IoT sensors/cameras in residences/hospitals that warn of emergency situations. These kinds of advances could be relevant for reducing human workload in caregiving.

This special issue welcomes both original research and review articles in the intersection of the fields of the IoT and healthcare using WCMC. We seek practical applications for solving narrowed problem scopes and theoretical procedural approaches to solve a wide range of problems. This issue also seeks solutions in the fields of security, data privacy, regulatory laws, efficient algorithms, collaboration among devices, artificial intelligence applications, multiagent systems, cloud computing, and edge computing, all of which applied to IoT healthcare systems using WCMC.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Mobile networks and communication systems for IoT healthcare systems
• Data mining in IoT healthcare systems with WCMC
• Artificial Intelligence techniques in IoT healthcare systems with WCMC
• Collaborative mechanisms or multiagent systems for IoT in healthcare with WCMC
• Virtual living-labs or virtual-reality systems for simulating IoT for healthcare with WCMC
• Security and privacy in IoT for healthcare with WCMC
• Cooperation between wearable technologies and other IoT smart devices for healthcare with WCMC
• Blue-sky ideas about possible IoT systems for healthcare with WCMC in some specific diseases
• Cloud or edge computing in IoT healthcare systems with WCMC
• IoT devices for partially automating caregiving with WCMC
• Low-cost IoT objects that can contribute to healthcare in daily life (e.g., smart pillow dispenser) or enhance medical services (e.g., smart hospital beds) with WCMC