Intelligent Personal Health Devices Converged with Internet of Things Networks

Smartphone technology has become more popular and innovative over the last few years, and has led to the prevalence of wearable devices embedded with body sensors for fitness tracking and various smartphone features. Internet of Things (IoT), which can interact with wearables and personal sensor devices (PSDs), is emerging with technologies such as mobile health (mHealth), the cloud, big data and smart environments like smart homes. It may also provide enhanced services utilising health data obtained from physiological sensors. When these sensors are converged with IoT devices, the volume of transactions and traffic are expected to increase immensely due to the increased demand of health data from the IoT network. These additional demands will affect the existing mHealth services. Health service providers may also demand more data to enhance their services such as real-time monitoring and actuation of sensors alongside the existing monitoring of traffic. Both of these situations can cause rapid battery consumption and consume significant bandwidth. Some PSDs are implanted on or inside the body, and may require invasive surgical operations to replace batteries, such as for a heart pacemaker. It is therefore crucial to save and conserve power consumption in order to reduce the frequency of such procedures as well as health data transmission when needed. There has not yet been any research into managing and controlling data processing and transmission to reduce transactions by applying intelligence onto body sensors. This paper provides a novel approach and solution to reduce data transactions in sensors and allow for the transfer of critical data without failure to medical practitioners over IoT traffic. This can be done via an inference system to transfer health data collected by body sensors efficiently and effectively to mHealth and IoT networks. The results from the experiments to reduce bandwidth and battery resources with heart rate sensors show a possible savings in resource usage of between 66% and 99.5%. Battery power can be saved by 3.14 Watts in the experiments if the transmission of a single 1KB data point is reduced, and by 7.47 Watts if the transmission of 628 data points totalling the size of 120KB is reduced. The accuracy of data inference between the originally sensed data and the data transmitted after inference can be maintained by up to 99% or more. Such savings have the potential of making always-on mHealth devices a practical reality. This research contributes a low-overhead approach to mHealth sensors by inferring the processing and transferring of data.