Abstract- The healthcare system implies a multi-factorial and multi-disciplinary approach because of the complexity of the entity itself. Internet of things (IoT) provides flexible and personalized solutions at a low costs. A literature review of application of IoT in the healthcare sector, with a particular focus on the operating room, has been performed. Index Terms- Internet of things, Healthcare, Operating room, Monitoring, Efficiency I. BACKGROUND The IEEE Community defines the IoT as: “… a self- configuring and adaptive system consisting of networks of sensors and smart objects whose purpose is to interconnect “all” things, including every day and industrial objects, in such a way as to make them intelligent, programmable and more capable of interacting with humans’’[1]. In addition, non-private hospitals represents complex system to manage, characterized by enormous and urgent needs and limited resources [2], [3]. Internet of things provides solution at lower costs [4]. II. LITERATURE REVIEW A literature review has been performed according to the following steps: (i) identification of the keywords and their combination; (ii) selection of a source database; (iii) results analysis. In a first selection on key words (i), the extraction was for: “internet of things” ,“operating room application” , “healthcare”, whereas the second one was composed by the following: “hospital”, “artificial intelligence”, “distributed computer system”, “privacy”. The searches were done separately for each keyword applied to the journals’ abstracts, title and keywords in each specific search engine. In the second step search (ii), two different abstracts and citations databases of peer-reviewed literature has been selected: Scopus and Science Direct. At the end of this phase 25 articles have been collected. Manuscript received July 21, 2018; revised July 30, 2018. C. Patrone is with E.O. Ospedali Galliera Genoa, ITALY (corresponding author to provide phone: +390105632975; e-mail: carlotta.patrone@ galliera.it). A. Khodabakhsh is with Mechanical, Energetic, Industrial and Transport Engineer Department (D.I.M.E.), University of Genoa, ITALY (e-mail: kd7alireza@gmail.com). M. Lattuada is with E.O. Ospedali Galliera Genoa, ITALY (e-mail: marco.lattuada@ galliera.it). R. Revetria is with Mechanical, Energetic, Industrial and Transport Engineer Department (D.I.M.E.), University of Genoa, ITALY (e-mail:roberto.revetria@unige.it). After a first evaluation of the abstracts, 22 studies have been considered. The collected papers were systematized in terms of: names of the authors, year of publication, journal title, objective, approach and characteristics. During the third step (iii), a new systematic analysis of core specifics has been performed. The present paper provides the state of the art in the healthcare application of Internet of Things IoT. Table I reports the results of this analysis. TABLE I State of the art in the healthcare application of IoT Field of Application IoT Healthcare Operating Room Total Hospital 4 2 3 9 Artificial Intelligence 3 2 2 7 Distributed computer system 3 2 1 6 Total 10 6 6 22 According to Figure 1, the topic was first covered in 2008, but nearly no significant paper appeared until 2012. Starting from 2015 an increasing interest in this field was evident, in fact the number of articles fast increased to reach us to maximum at 2016 and 2017. The authors reported also the data of 2018 which is still in progress. Fig. 1. Publications for year Reference [5] focused on three main areas of IoT intervention in the healthcare: •clinical care: sensors will help hospitalized patients for a continuous monitoring and the doctors reducing the time C. Patrone, A. Khodabakhsh, M. Lattuada, R. Revetria Internet of Things Application in the Healthcare Sector Proceedings of the World Congress on Engineering and Computer Science 2018 Vol I WCECS 2018, October 23-25, 2018, San Francisco, USA ISBN: 978-988-14048-1-7 ISSN: 2078-0958 (Print); ISSN: 2078-0966 (Online) WCECS 2018