Abstract:

Community pharmacies are the most frequently accessed healthcare contact point for older adults and are structurally positioned to support polypharmacy management. The Internet of Things (IoT) offers a pathway to reposition these settings as active, data-generating nodes within geriatric care networks, yet no integrated framework has mapped this potential comprehensively.

This narrative review synthesises evidence on IoT-enabled technologies in community pharmacy and proposes a conceptual framework for geriatric medication management, focusing on polypharmacy, adherence, and error prevention. Two evidence streams were used: a scoping review of 74 peer-reviewed studies (January 2020-January 2026; JBI methodology, PRISMA-ScR; three databases, 30 countries) and a targeted Scopus search on IoT frameworks and geriatric care. Findings support a four-layer IoT architecture encompassing sensing and capture, local clinical decision support, network integration, and patient engagement. Applied to geriatric care, this enables three core applications: polypharmacy reconciliation, opportunistic point-of-care diagnostic screening, and chronic disease adherence monitoring. Persistent barriers include interoperability deficits, digital literacy gaps among pharmacists and patients, and structural inequity in digital access. Community pharmacies possess the positioning and emerging infrastructure to function as IoT-enabled geriatric care nodes. Realising this requires enforced interoperability standards, investment in pharmacist digital competency, and equity-sensitive deployment frameworks targeting populations at risk of digital exclusion.