IoHT and Edge Computing, Warrants of Optimal Responsiveness of Monitoring Applications for Seniors. A Case Study

The global ageing population puts a burden on healthcare systems not only from the point of view of cost-related aspects, but also from the senior patients' point of view who tend to be predominately empowered regarding their own health management, digitally-skilled and demanding for personalized health protocols and solutions. Silver Digital Patients can be defined as seniors that master improved abilities of using digital technology in their daily activities, including in monitoring their health, who prove increased interest in having access to the best healthcare to preserve as much as possible their independence and health. An active, decent and safe life for seniors is at its best in their own homes; therefore, a remote health monitoring represents the most appropriate way to smooth the disruptive degenerative age-related factors, together with the important benefit of relieving the expenditures for senior institutionalizations. In this respect, emerging senior-centered technologies have the potential to provide a reliable support for building the most appropriate healthcare provision and environment. Internet of Health Things (IoHT) is a concept for a great variety of devices connected to the Internet that are able to gather a huge amount of diverse data - like health or environmental parameters - in order to keep a close remote watch on the patient, to improve the diagnose of his/her health status and to establish a better preventative healthcare. Edge computing brings the potential of improving the performance and responsiveness of IoHT by allowing the real-time collected data to be pre-processed closer to the source, which can be extremely important for time-sensitive health data in order to identify and trigger anticipatory or reactive health actions. This paper presents a case study -" Non-invasive monitoring and health assessment of the elderly in a smart environment (RO-SmartAgeing)" project - that evaluates the opportunities brought by IoHT and edge computing for a monitoring application. The general objective of this project is to demonstrate the potential of some emerging technology for the positive transformation of how healthcare services are provided to the seniors and to healthcare provider. According to its current development state, a proposed IoHT-based architecture of the monitoring application and a data analytics demo for a health parameter is presented.