ISO/IEEE 11073 interoperability for personal health devices based on ZigBee healthcare service

In this paper, we present an efficient method for establishing interoperability between legacy (nonstandard) personal health devices (PHDs) and standard PHD managers. Because legacy PHDs usually do not conform to the 11073 PHD standards, we propose a ZigBee Adaptation Module (ZAM) that can provide ISO/IEEE 11073 interoperability for legacy PHDs on the basis of the ZigBee Health Care (HC) profile. The ZAM allows for the exchange of the nonstandard messages of the legacy PHD with the messages corresponding to the 11073 standard in an interoperable manner. The ZAM also supports an HC profile for standard ZigBee communication with the PHD manager. To demonstrate this, we developed a PHD manager and the ZAM using a legacy device that measures blood pressure and glucose levels.