ORIGINAL PAPER An IoT architecture for preventive maintenance of medical devices in healthcare organizations Jamal Maktoubian 1,2 & Keyvan Ansari 3 Received: 25 July 2018 /Accepted: 14 December 2018 # IUPESM and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract In recent years, hospitals have spent a significant amount on technologically advanced medical equipment to ensure not only the accuracy and reliability of medical devices, but also the required level of performance. Although medical devices have been revolutionized thanks to technology advancements, outdated maintenance strategies are still used in healthcare systems and services. Also, maintenance plans must often be developed for a mixture of advanced and obsolete technologies being used in medical devices. Therefore, most healthcare organizations have been facing the challenge of detecting equipment-related risks that would have been alleviated if effective integrity monitoring mechanisms were in place. Additionally, continuously growing volumes of large data streams, collected from sensors and actuators embedded into network-enabled sensors and microprocessors of medical equipment, require a scalable platform architecture to support the necessary storage and real-time processing of the data for device monitoring and maintenance. This paper investigates the issue of maintaining medical devices through an Internet-of-Things (IoT)-enabled autonomous integrity monitoring mechanism for those devices generating large-scale real-time data in healthcare organizations. The proposed architecture that includes an integrity monitoring framework and a data analytics module ensures the complete visibility into medical devices and provides a facility to predict possible failures before happening. Keywords Real-time monitoring information system . Big data . Medical devices . Internet-of-Things (IoT) . Network-enabled preventive maintenance 1 Introduction Actively monitoring the status of critical infrastructure in healthcare organizations is a key measure for improving pre- ventive maintenance planning and asset optimization. The use of real-time monitoring systems for hospital devices has been increased to lessen the effect of maintenance defects and fail- ures [1]. However, every year many patients die due to the failure of medical monitoring devices [2]. Non-standard and low-quality medical devices have been manufactured under insufficient quality control schemes [3] and therefore such devices become inaccurate after a while because of compo- nent wear or failure. This is particularly considerable in the case of life-critical systems such as health monitoring systems found in hospitals. According to the study by Ramezani et al. [4] in 2016, over 10,000 different types of medical equipment are found in an average to large sized hospital. Also, considerable mainte- nance costs are attributed to the limitations that technicians and engineers face when maintaining assets. Although finding strategies for reducing maintenance costs could be beneficial to save patients’ lives, the traditional maintenance strategies do not meet the needs of today’ s healthcare organizations [5]. Integrity monitoring technologies have the potential to predict integrity risks, false alarms or failures in hospital devices, i.e., life-critical equipment, to save patients’ lives and reduce maintenance expenses. Some industries have employed advanced maintenance and monitoring programs to identify component wear and breakage and find early signs of potential problems before a system fails. Different mechanisms for equipment condition * Jamal Maktoubian jamal.maktoubian@gmail.com 1 University of Mysore, Mysore, Karnataka, India 2 Farafekr Technology LTD, #7, 4th Floor, Almas building, Takhti St, Babol, Mazandaran, Iran 3 University of the Sunshine Coast, Sippy Downs, Queensland, Australia Health and Technology https://doi.org/10.1007/s12553-018-00286-0