Early identification of chronic kidney disease (CKD) can prevent progression to renal failure, yet effective screening outside specialist settings remains limited. We present an Internet-of-Things (IoT) platform coupled with a leakage-free machine-learning (ML) pipeline for periodic remote CKD risk scoring. Using a retrospective dataset of electronic health records from 491 adults (21 variables) as a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) to simulate IoT-transmitted patient data, we compare seven classifiers combined with supervised feature selection (FS: Chi-square, ANOVA, Mutual Information) and dimensionality reduction (DR: PCA, UMAP) after imputation, scaling, and class-imbalance handling via model weighting. Performance is estimated with \(10\times \) repeated, stratified 10-fold cross-validation and a nested threshold selection tailored to screening. To prioritize case detection, we evaluate models at a Screening Operating Point that maximizes recall while maintaining high specificity ( \(\approx 80\%\) ), accepting the trade-off of modest precision. Under this clinically aligned policy, Logistic Regression (LR) provides the best sensitivity–specificity balance across FS/DR settings, with recalls in the 0.773-−0.843 range and specificities 0.791-−0.803 (e.g., ANOVA FS: recall \(0.843\pm 0.147\) , specificity \(0.796\pm 0.079\) , ROC–AUC \(0.880\pm 0.050\) ; PCA: recall \(0.827\pm 0.137\) , specificity \(0.803\pm 0.074\) , ROC–AUC \(0.890\pm 0.045\) ). At this operating point, precision remains modest (PPV \(\approx 0.33\) –0.35), reflecting a substantial number of false positives, whereas negative predictive value is consistently high (typically \(\approx 0.96\) –0.97). For comparison, at a standard F1-optimal operating point, gradient-boosting ensembles increase precision at the cost of recall (e.g., CatBoost + Chi-square: recall \(0.573\pm 0.202\) ), underscoring the importance of aligning the operating threshold with clinical priorities. Overall, methodological alignment outweighs model complexity for screening utility. Coupled with our scalable IoT architecture, a simple, highly discriminative LR + FS/PCA pipeline—operated under a specificity constraint—offers a low-cost, deployable solution for proactive CKD management.