Innovative IT solutions in health and sport - the importance of wearable devices, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and Big Data

Healthcare faces a significant shortage of human and financial resources. One way to overcome this is to focus on preventive medicine, through the promotion of sport and the use of advanced IT (Information Technology) tools in healthcare. These tools include wearables, the IoT (Internet of Things), Big Data and AI (artificial intelligence). This narrative review article aims to present the current state of the art in the field to support the processing of literature at the beginning of new researches by reviewing the major literature focusing on three of the data management’s functions: data collection, storing and processing. To quantify the studies, queries were run on ScienceDirect, PubMed, Web of Science, Google Scholar databases. The keywords used in the queries were "Internet of Things", "Big Data", "Artificial intelligence" and "Wearable devices" complemented by the terms "health" and "sports" so a total of 8 queries were run on each database. We selected only scientific articles which contain concrete results, present ICT tools used in health or sport, and were fully available from our institution's network so we examined 35 articles. The results of the queries show that in most cases more than 50% of the literature was published since 2019, so the topic is currently a highly researched area. On average, 59.57% of all published works were published from 2019 in Science Direct, 74.49% in PubMed and 77.18% in Web of Science. The above-mentioned IT tools on health and sport is significant. Their importance is most notable in the advancement of preventive medicine and innovation in medical research.