Integrating Medical and Wearable Devices with E-Health Systems Using Horizontal IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) has unleashed the potential to expand the deployment of e-health systems by facilitating remote monitoring and introducing emerging IoT-enabled devices. However, this requires e-health systems to dynamically integrate a variety of heterogeneous IoT-enabled devices. In this paper, a four-phase device integration process is proposed to connect IoT-enabled medical devices with e-health systems through the use of horizontal IoT platforms. Horizontal platforms are used to facilitate the management of heterogeneous devices and their huge amount of data. The IoT-enabled medical devices are classified into direct and indirect devices based on their data availability to the platform. Data collection from direct devices is performed through wired or wireless communication. In contrast, indirect devices make their data available only to the cloud, from where the platform can access and retrieve the data. The proposed integration process is then implemented using OM2M horizontal IoT platform through two use cases of integrating direct and indirect real devices. For each use case, the technical details of the implementation phases are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed device integration process. Finally, technical considerations and challenges are discussed for generalizing the proposed integration process to other medical devices.