Analysis of OPC unified architecture for healthcare applications

Abstract

This study presents an assessment of the OPC Unified Architecture as an integration framework for heterogeneous healthcare systems enabling compliance with the Industry 4.0 paradigm. The contributions of this work are: 1) a conceptual architecture with heterogeneous networks for enabling Internet of Things healthcare applications, 2) OPC UA data models based on the HL7 Reference Information Model for information exchange and storage, and 3) an analysis of how OPC UA can enable the healthcare sector to be part of the Industry 4.0.