Ubiquitous Data Accessing Method in IoT-Based Information System for Emergency Medical Services

TLDR

IoT enables connectivity of diverse smart objects, yet heterogeneity of data formats and the surge of real‑time data make storage and access difficult. The study proposes a semantic data model and a resource‑based data‑accessing method (UDA‑IoT) to store, interpret, and ubiquitously retrieve IoT data. UDA‑IoT acquires and processes IoT data across heterogeneous platforms, enhancing accessibility to data resources on cloud and mobile systems. An IoT‑based emergency medical services system demonstrates that UDA‑IoT effectively supports timely, ubiquitous data access in a distributed heterogeneous environment.

Abstract

The rapid development of Internet of things (IoT) technology makes it possible for connecting various smart objects together through the Internet and providing more data interoperability methods for application purpose. Recent research shows more potential applications of IoT in information intensive industrial sectors such as healthcare services. However, the diversity of the objects in IoT causes the heterogeneity problem of the data format in IoT platform. Meanwhile, the use of IoT technology in applications has spurred the increase of real-time data, which makes the information storage and accessing more difficult and challenging. In this research, first a semantic data model is proposed to store and interpret IoT data. Then a resource-based data accessing method (UDA-IoT) is designed to acquire and process IoT data ubiquitously to improve the accessibility to IoT data resources. Finally, we present an IoT-based system for emergency medical services to demonstrate how to collect, integrate, and interoperate IoT data flexibly in order to provide support to emergency medical services. The result shows that the resource-based IoT data accessing method is effective in a distributed heterogeneous data environment for supporting data accessing timely and ubiquitously in a cloud and mobile computing platform.