UPnP and IEEE 11073: Integrating personal health devices in home networks

Personal Health Devices (PHDs) with wireless technologies are becoming popular for remotely monitoring patients. However, although these devices are portable and mostly used at home, their integration with Consumer Electronics (CE) devices and networks is still in the earlier steps. This article presents a reference architecture that integrates at home PHDs and CE devices based on the UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) technology and the IEEE 11073 set of standards. This article introduces a UPnP device architecture for personal m-Health (mobile Health), describing how different types of devices interact to exchange personal health information. One of the main features of this work is the use of widely adopted data formats, such as eXtended Markup Language (XML) for health information exchange based on IEEE 11073 data model. Such approach enables web based CE networks, such as UPnP, to interact with PHD devices efficiently.