Abstract The Internet of Health Things promotes personalized and higher standards of care. Its application is diverse and attracts the attention of a substantial section of the scientific community. This approach has also been applied by people looking to enhance quality of life by using this technology. In this paper, we perform a survey that aims to present and analyze the advances of the latest studies based on medical care and assisted environment. We focus on articles for online monitoring, detection, and support of the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. Our research covers published manuscripts in scientific journals and recognized conferences since the year 2015. Also, we present a reference model based on the evaluation of the resources used from the selected studies. Finally, our proposal aims to help future enthusiasts to discover and enumerate the required factors for the development of a prototype for online heart monitoring purposes.