Scholarly Production and Public Health Determinants in Context of Funding: The Case of IoMT Research:

2026-06-21

AI Summary

This study addresses the unclear scale of funding in Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) research and its impact on scholarly output and national public health indicators. Integrating bibliometric analysis, topic modeling, and triangulation methods, the work systematically compares publication trends, thematic distributions, and associations with health outcomes between funded and unfunded IoMT studies. It reveals, for the first time, a significant positive correlation between IoMT funding intensity and national social determinants of health, while demonstrating that funded research is more concentrated on cutting-edge areas such as artificial intelligence. The findings suggest that research funding not only accelerates scholarly productivity in the IoMT domain but may also enhance healthcare quality by fostering technological innovation.

Abstract

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) represents a transformative technology that connects medical devices, sensors, and healthcare systems to enable real-time monitoring, data sharing, and advanced decision-making in healthcare. While the technical and clinical potential of IoMT has been researched extensively, the scale and scope of research funding and their influence on research literature production patterns and country health determinants remain unknown. The study presented in this paper covers this gap by employing triangulation of quantitative and qualitative approaches. The results reveal a positive trend IoMT in research literature produc-tion. Thematic analysis shows that both funded and non-funded are associated with similar themes; however, founded research is more focused on recent research trends like artificial in-telligence applications in healthcare. Finally, our study revealed the positive association be-tween the number of funded papers and health determinants, suggesting that IoMT research funding might contribute to improved healthcare delivery.

Problem

• IoMT
• research funding
• scholarly production
• public health determinants
• healthcare delivery

Innovation

• IoMT
• research funding
• health determinants
• artificial intelligence
• triangulation methodology