IReHMo: An efficient IoT-based remote health monitoring system for smart regions

The ageing population worldwide is constantly rising, both in urban and regional areas. There is a need for IoT-based remote health monitoring systems that take care of the health of elderly people without compromising their convenience and preference of staying at home. However, such systems may generate large amounts of data. The key research challenge addressed in this paper is to efficiently transmit healthcare data within the limit of the existing network infrastructure, especially in remote areas. In this paper, we identified the key network requirements of a typical remote health monitoring system in terms of real-time event update, bandwidth requirements and data generation. Furthermore, we studied the network communication protocols such as CoAP, MQTT and HTTP to understand the needs of such a system, in particular the bandwidth requirements and the volume of generated data. Subsequently, we have proposed IReHMo - an IoT-based remote health monitoring architecture that efficiently delivers healthcare data to the servers. The CoAP-based IReHMo implementation helps to reduce up to 90% volume of generated data for a single sensor event and up to 56% required bandwidth for a healthcare scenario. Finally, we conducted a scalability analysis to determine the feasibility of deploying IReHMo in large numbers in regions of north Sweden.