Security Vulnerabilities and Resilience Strategies in Healthcare IoT Systems: A Comprehensive Review

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in the healthcare industry, also known as the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), have proven to greatly improve patient monitoring, diagnostics, and clinical decision-making. The increasing prevalence of resource-challenged medical devices, wireless connectivity, and cloud services, however, has brought new risks around security and privacy concerns that can now directly impact patient safety and data integrity. In this paper, a thorough study of 41 peer-reviewed research papers from January 2018 through May 2025 revealed the current state of security vulnerabilities and resilience strategies in healthcare IoT systems. It provides a comprehensive analysis of security threats at the device, network, and application levels such as unauthorized access, malware and ransomware, data breaches, and denial-of-service attacks delivered in a systematic manner. This contrasts with existing surveys, which consider single security mechanisms and improve upon various multi-layered security means such as AI-enabled anomaly detection, blockchain-based authentication and auditability, low-compute cryptographic techniques, and privacy-preserving methods such as federated learning. The outcomes also show that although emerging technologies add a great deal of security and trust capabilities, issues on scalability, interoperability, deployment, and regulations are not yet fully addressed. This review highlights important knowledge gaps and offers structured knowledge and future directions for research to address the design of secure, resilient, and practically deployable IoMT architectures for real-world healthcare environments.