## 2 Visions, Applications and Challenges of the IoT
### Applications of the IoT  
IoT applications in various sectors have been assessed based on their impacts on society and the economy along with their technology readiness level (TRL). The applications of the IoT are diversified based on their use in different fields such as intelligent homes, healthcare, agriculture, transportation, the environment, education, retail and logistics, industries and many more [31; 32; 33; 34]. Consequently, the IoT has also had an impact during the pandemic era of COVID-19 in many aspects, e.g., contact tracing, virus detection by temperature scanning, remote health monitoring, quarantine e-tracking, virus spread control, etc., and also in tackling the post-COVID-19 situation [35; 36; 37; 38]. AI-integrated IoT technology for the  
Figure 3: Technologies impacting the IoT.  
early detection of COVID-19 is discussed in [37]. This research mainly focuses on analyzing the extracted features of cough, shortness of breath and speech difficulties by using long short-term memory (LSTM) with recurrent neural network (RNN). In [38], an IoT-based real-time learning system is developed to control the spread of COVID-19 infection in the context of smart healthcare for residents. The system is used to monitor and analyze user activities and environmental parameters which helps predict critical cases, so alerts can be sent to the caretakers. A few applications of the IoT are briefly presented in Table 2.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline
**Focused Area** & & **Applications** & **References** \\ \hline \multirow{6}{*}{Intelligent Home} & \(\bullet\) & Facilitating comfortable lifestyle \\  & \(\bullet\) & Helps in reducing the carbon footprint of energy \\  & \(\bullet\) & consumption \\  & \(\bullet\) & Intrusion detection \\  & \(\bullet\) & QoS-based services \\  & \(\bullet\) & Design of sensitive home automation system \\  & \(\bullet\) & Indoor monitoring \\ \hline \multirow{6}{*}{Smart Cities} & \(\bullet\) & Analyze and predict the performance of applications used \\  & \(\bullet\) & Location finding along with the updated location \\  & \(\bullet\) & Smart energy \\  & \(\bullet\) & Smart mobility and traffic management \\  & \(\bullet\) & Digital forensics \\  & \(\bullet\) & Smart governance \\  & \(\bullet\) & Smart healthcare \\  & \(\bullet\) & Smart education \\ \hline \multirow{6}{*}{Medical and Health Care} & \(\bullet\) & Health and fitness monitoring \\  & \(\bullet\) & Remote medical diagnostics \\  & \(\bullet\) & Wearable electronics gadgets \\  & \(\bullet\) & Patient monitoring \\ \cline{1-1}  & \(\bullet\) & Disease management system to improve reliability \\ \cline{1-1}  & \(\bullet\) & Mobile medical home monitoring system to improve the \\ \cline{1-1}  & \(\bullet\) & rapidity of factor measurements \\ \cline{1-1}  & \(\bullet\) & Human factor evaluation in information exchange in the \\ \cline{1-1}  & \(\bullet\) & healthcare environment \\ \cline{1-1}  & \(\bullet\) & Integration of AI in clinical medicine \\ \hline \multirow{6}{*}{Environment} & \(\bullet\) & Ecological habitat monitoring \\  & \(\bullet\) & Weather monitoring \\ \cline{1-1}  & \(\bullet\) & CO\({}_{2}\) Emission monitoring \\ \cline{1-1}  & \(\bullet\) & Collection of recyclable materials \\ \cline{1-1}  & \(\bullet\) & Smart disaster management system \\ \cline{1-1}  & \(\bullet\) & The revival of a rural hydrological/water monitoring \\ \cline{1-1}  & \(\bullet\) & System environment \\ \cline{1-1}  & \(\bullet\) & Water environment monitoring \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 2: Applications of the IoT.