W2E-–Wellness Warehouse Engine for Semantic Interoperability of Consumer Health Data

Novel health monitoring devices and applications allow consumers easy and ubiquitous ways to monitor their health status. However, technologies from different providers lack both technical and semantic interoperability and hence the resulting health data are often deeply tied to a specific service, which is limiting its reusability and utilization in different services. We have designed a Wellness Warehouse Engine (W2E) that bridges this gap and enables seamless exchange of data between different services. W2E provides interfaces to various data sources and makes data available via unified representational state transfer application programming interface to other services. Importantly, it includes Unifier--an engine that allows transforming input data into generic units reusable by other services, and Analyzer--an engine that allows advanced analysis of input data, such as combining different data sources into new output parameters. In this paper, we describe the architecture of W2E and demonstrate its applicability by using it for unifying data from four consumer activity trackers, using a test base of 20 subjects each carrying out three different tracking sessions. Finally, we discuss challenges of building a scalable Unifier engine for the ever-enlarging number of new devices.