A FHIR based architecture of a multiprotocol IoT Home Gateway supporting dynamic plug of new devices within instrumented environments

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have become a milestone advancement in the digital healthcare domain, since the number of IoT medical devices is grown exponentially, and it is now anticipated that by 2020 there will be over 161 million of them connected worldwide. Therefore, in an era of continuous growth, IoT healthcare faces various challenges, such as the collection over multiple protocols (e.g, Bluetooth, MQTT, CoAP, ZigBEE etc.) the interpretation, as well as the harmonization of the data format that derive from the existing huge amounts of heterogeneous IoT medical devices. In this respect this study aims at proposing an advanced Home Gateway architecture that offers a unique data collection module, supporting direct data acquisition over multiple protocols (i.e. BLE, MQTT) and indirect data retrieval from cloud health services (i.e, GoogleFit). Moreover the solution propose a mechanism to automatically convert the original data format, carried over BLE, in HL7 FHIR by exploiting device capabilities semantic annotation implemented by means of FHIR resource as well. The adoption of such annotation enables the dynamic plug of new sensors within the instrumented environment without the need to stop and adapt the gateway. This simplifies the dynamic devices landscape customization requested by the several telemedicine applications contexts (e.g. CVD, Diabetes) and demonstrate, for the first time, a concrete example of using the FHIR standard not only (as usual) for health resources representation and storage but also as instrument to enable seamless integration of IoT devices. The proposed solution also relies on mobile phone technology which is widely adopted aiming at reducing any obstacle for a larger adoption.