Impact of the Internet of Things on Psychology: A Survey

Abstract

The Internet of things (IoT) continues to “smartify” human life while influencing areas such as industry, education, economy, business, medicine, and psychology. The introduction of the IoT in psychology has resulted in various intelligent systems that aim to help people—particularly those with special needs, such as the elderly, disabled, and children. This paper proposes a framework to investigate the role and impact of the IoT in psychology from two perspectives: (1) the goals of using the IoT in this area, and (2) the computational technologies used towards this purpose. To this end, existing studies are reviewed from these viewpoints. The results show that the goals of using the IoT can be identified as morale improvement, diagnosis, and monitoring. Moreover, the main technical contributions of the related papers are system design, data mining, or hardware invention and signal processing. Subsequently, unique features of state-of-the-art research in this area are discussed, including the type and diversity of sensors, crowdsourcing, context awareness, fog and cloud platforms, and inference. Our concluding remarks indicate that this area is in its infancy and, consequently, the next steps of this research are discussed.