Interconnected Personal Health Record Ecosystem Using IoT Cloud Platform and HL7 FHIR

Personal health record (PHR) systems have yet to reach mass adoption despite years of varied implementations. In this paper, we examine the limitations of current PHRs and propose an interconnected PHR system built in adherence with healthcare data communication standards and an IoT Cloud platform. The new ecosystem includes: an interoperable hospital information system to store electronic medical records (EMRs) and transfer them to a PHR system via email; a public cloud that supports encrypted data sharing for big data analysis services; a PHR gateway repository based on an IoT module which communicates with hospitals and public clouds; and a mobile application to manage and view PHR. This system can store and share raw EMR and life log data based on the healthcare communication standard "HL7 FHIR". To validate the usability of the interconnected PHR system, a clinical trial is underway to develop an obesity management model from individuals' hospital-provided genomic data, on the one hand, and diet and exercise logs gathered by the mobile application, on the other. We demonstrate how the proposed IoT Cloud based PHR ecosystem is interoperable and practical for promoting healthcare big data analysis services.