Internet-of-Things-Enabled Data Fusion Method for Sleep Healthcare Applications

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) aims to exploit the Internet-of-Things (IoT) techniques to provide better medical treatment scheme for patients with smart, automatic, timely, and emotion-aware clinical services. One of the IoMT instances is applying IoT techniques to sleep-aware smartphones or wearable devices’ applications to provide better sleep healthcare services. As we all know, sleep is vital to our daily health. What is more, studies have shown a strong relationship between sleep difficulties and various diseases such as COVID-19. Therefore, leveraging IoT techniques to develop a longer lifetime sleep healthcare IoMT system, with a tradeoff between data transferring/processing speed and battery energy efficiency, to provide longer time services for bad sleep condition persons, especially the COVID-19 patients or survivors, is a meaningful research topic. In this study, we propose an IoT-enabled sleep data fusion networks (SDFN) module with a star topology Bluetooth network to fuse data of sleep-aware applications. A machine learning model is built to detect sleep events through an audio signal. We design two data reprocessing mechanisms running on our IoT devices to alleviate the data jam problem and save the IoT devices’ battery energy. The experiments manifest that the presented module and mechanisms can save the energy of the system and alleviate the data jam problem of the device.