Erosion, Degradation, and Reliability of Next‐Generation Biomedical Internet of Medical Things Devices: Mechanisms, Monitoring, and Predictive Modeling

Next‐generation biomedical Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices such as implantable sensors, wearable systems, and hybrid transcutaneous platforms have radically changed the way we approach healthcare, enabling continuous patient monitoring and real‐time intervention. With the global biomedical IoMT market expected to exceed USD 187 billion by 2028, the question of how long these devices can operate reliably is an urgent concern for engineers and clinicians alike. However, the realization of this potential is blocked by the fact that these devices degrade. Material erosion, corrosion, wear, tribocorrosion, and biologically induced breakdown—all driven by the harsh physiological conditions inside and on the human body—place hard limits on how long a device can safely operate. Unlike traditional implants, IoMT devices include miniature electronics and wireless telemetry into a variety of material interfaces. Such complexity means that failures rarely happen in isolation—different degradation pathways reinforce each other in ways that are hard to predict. This review concentrates on the degradation of IoMT devices at the system level, discussing the underlying failure mechanisms, material selection, surface engineering strategies, and the often‐overlooked topics of packaging and hermetic sealing. We cover electrochemical corrosion, mechanically assisted wear, polymer hydrolysis, biofouling, and additive manufacturing induced surface instabilities for both implantable and wearable systems. Also, existing in vitro, in vivo, and accelerated‐aging test methods are critically evaluated with specific emphasis on their inadequacy in mimicking the coupled long‐term stressors experienced by devices in real life application. In addition to materials and testing, this work addresses the emerging ability of IoMT devices to monitor their own degradation in real‐time, via impedance‐based sensing, embedded electrochemical microsensors, and wireless telemetry to stream device health data to clinicians. We describe how physics‐based models can be combined with data‐driven models to predict remaining useful life (RUL). We discuss the role of machine learning, hybrid degradation frameworks, uncertainty quantification and the explainability requirements imposed by regulators. Finally, we identify the open problems—standardization gaps, unresolved modeling challenges and broader engineering questions—which must be addressed before truly erosion‐aware, self‐monitoring IoMT devices become clinical reality. Our goal is to serve as a complete, technical reference for material scientists, device engineers, and clinicians to design IoMT systems that work and remain durable and safe for long‐term use. A synthesis of available IoMT failure data shows that corrosion and wear combined contribute to more than 45% of device failures, a figure that alone justifies the case for taking degradation‐aware design seriously. The novelty of this review is that it is, to our knowledge, the first to unify these numbers into a single IoMT‐specific framework: it synthesizes findings from 20 primary experimental studies spanning corrosion, wear and tribocorrosion and 48 total references, quantifies that corrosion and wear together account for over 45% of reported device failures, and shows that packaging and interconnect degradation is the single most common precursor to catastrophic failure across the implantable, wearable and hybrid device classes (Section 10).