Leveraging 6G, extended reality, and IoT big data analytics for healthcare: A review

Abstract

In recent years, the healthcare industry has faced new challenges around staffing, human interaction, and the adoption of telehealth. Technological innovations can improve efficiency, productivity, and patient outcomes, but healthcare has been slow to adopt them. However, the promise of 6G communication, extended reality (XR), and the Internet of Things (IoT) big data analytics may revolutionize healthcare policies. Next-generation healthcare systems can utilize these technologies to offer novel healthcare services such as telepresence, holographic, and haptic communication. XR can provide immersive experiences that are revolutionizing many domains of the healthcare ecosystem, from self-care to surgical procedures. IoT can connect miniature healthcare objects with the Internet to provide smart healthcare services, generating big data that can be analyzed using deep learning to improve the quality of healthcare services, disease diagnosis, and treatment. There is a lack of reviews that focus on analyzing the latest perspectives and future trends on how a convergence of these technologies will influence future healthcare systems. This research paper aims to fill that gap by providing a detailed review of how the convergence of these technologies will influence the future of healthcare systems. It provides a detailed literature review of how healthcare systems have utilized technologies based on 6G, XR and IoT big data analytics for effective and scalable healthcare services provisioning. It also highlights how future healthcare systems can synergistically leverage 6G, XR, and IoT data analytics and provide insightful taxonomies based on different parameters along with a description of current challenges and future directions. 2023 Elsevier Inc.