Standard-based and distributed health information sharing for mHealth IoT systems

The increasing availability of connected Personal Health Devices (PHDs) enables a new type of information to be available in the Internet: health information. Most of these devices have specific ways to connect and share information to the Internet through gateways or health managers, creating vertical solutions where one device just talks to one health service. In this context, this paper proposes an architecture that considers the use of different types of health managers and gateways, but keeping interoperability by the use of widely adopted standards. The main contribution of this work is the distribution of health managers in different locations, such as mobile devices and cloud applications, enabling the use of a single health service for different types of PHDs. The ISO/IEEE 11073 standard is used as core technology, enabling the transport of PHD information over different technologies and protocols. We also present a new classification of health managers based on requirements of legacy m-health services. In conclusion, the results of the integration with a real cloud-based connected health system are presented and evaluated.