IoTility: Architectural Requirements for Enabling Health IoT Ecosystems

The increasing ubiquity of the Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to drastically alter the way healthcare systems are utilized at home or in a care environment. Smart things offer new ways to assist in general patient wellness, such as promoting an active and healthy lifestyle and simplifying treatment management. We believe smart health things bring new requirements not typically addressed in traditional IoT systems, and that an architecture targeting these devices must address such requirements to fully utilize their potential and safe usage. We believe such an architecture will help improve adoption and efficacy, closing gaps between the variety of emerging health IoT systems. In this paper, we present a number of requirements we consider integral to the continued expansion of the digital health IoT ecosystem (Health IoT). We consider the current landscape of IoT in relation to these requirements and present solutions that address two pressing requirements: 1) democratizing mobile health apps (giving users control and ownership over their app and data), and 2) making mobile apps act and behave like any other thing in an IoT. We present an implementation and evaluation of these Health IoT requirements to show how health-specific solutions can drive and influence the design of more generalized IoT architectures.