The Internet of Things (IoT) proposes to connect the physical world to the Internet, which opens up the possibility of developing various applications, especially in healthcare. These applications require a huge number of sensors to collect information continuously, generating large data flows, often excessive, redundant, or without meaning for the system s operations. This massive generation of sensor data wastes computational resources to acquire, transmit, store, and process information, leading to the loss of efficiency of these systems over time. In addition, IoT devices are designed to be small and portable, powered by batteries, for increased mobility and minimized interference with the monitored environment. However, this design also results in energy consumption restrictions, making battery lifetime a significant challenge that needs to be addressed. Furthermore, these systems often operate in unpredictable environments, which can generate redundant and negligible alarms, rendering them ineffective. However, a self-adaptive system that identifies and predicts imminent risks using early-warning scores (EWS) can cope with these issues. Due to its low processing cost, EWS guidelines can be embedded in wearable and sensor devices, allowing better management of sampling rates, transmissions, alarm production, and energy consumption. Following the aforementioned idea, this thesis presents a solution combining EWS with a self-adaptive algorithm for IoT patient monitoring applications. Thus, promoting a reduction in data acquisition and transmission, decreasing non-actionable alarms, and providing energy savings for these devices. In addition, we designed and developed a hardware prototype capable of embedding our proposal, which attested to its technical feasibility. Moreover, using our wearable prototype, we collected the energy consumption data of hardware components and used them during our simulations with real patient data from public datasets. Our experiments demonstrated great benefits of our approach, reducing by 87 percent the sampled data, 99 percent the total payload of the transmitted messages from the monitoring device, 78 percent of the alarms, and an energy saving of almost 82 percent. However, the fidelity of monitoring the clinical status of patients showed a mean total absolute error of 6.8 percent (plus-minus 5.5 percent) but minimized to 3.8 percent (plus-minus 2.8 percent) in a configuration with lower data reduction gains. The total loss of alarm detection depends on the configuration of frequencies and time windows, remaining between 0.5 percent and 9.5 percent, with an accuracy of the type of alarm between 89 percent and 94 percent. In conclusion, this work presents an approach for more efficient use of computational, communication, and energy resources to implement IoT-based patient monitoring applications.