IoT requirements and architecture for personal health

Lindquist, Wyatt and Helal, Sumi (2020) IoT requirements and architecture for personal health. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Personal health devices and wearables have the potential to drastically change the current landscape of wellness and care delivery. As these devices become commonplace, more and more patients are gaining access to new forms of simplified health monitoring and data collection, empowering them to engage in their own health and well-being in unprecedented ways. Cheap and easy-to-use health IoT devices are leading the transformation towards a continuum-of-care health system—focused on detection and prevention—where health issues can be caught before hospital care or professional intervention is needed. However, this vision is set to outpace the expectations and capabilities of today’s connected health devices, challenging existing ecosystems with unique requirements on functionality, connectivity, and usability. This thesis presents a set of health IoT requirements that are especially relevant to the design of a connected device’s low-level software features: its thing architecture. These requirements represent shared concerns in health-related IoT scenarios that can be solved with the features and capabilities of smart things. The thesis presents an architectural design and implementation of concrete features influenced by some of these requirements—leading to the Atlas Health IoT Architecture—which explores the role of safe and meaningful interactions between devices and users, referred to as IoTility. The thesis also considers the IoTility of smartphone applications in health scenarios, called Mobile Apps As Things (MAAT), resulting in a programming enabler that more closely integrates app features with those of physical thing devices. Alongside these implementations, this thesis presents a set of experimental evaluations investigating the feasibility of both MAAT and the architectural requirements as a whole.