An IoT-Aware Architecture for Smart Healthcare Systems

TLDR

IoT advances, especially RFID, WSN, and smart mobile technologies, are driving new applications in healthcare and beyond. This paper proposes an IoT‑aware smart architecture for automatic monitoring and tracking of patients, personnel, and biomedical devices in hospitals and nursing institutes. The architecture, called Smart Hospital System (SHS), integrates RFID, WSN, and smart mobile devices via CoAP/IPv6/6LoWPAN/REST, collecting real‑time environmental and physiological data through a low‑power hybrid sensing network and delivering it to a control center where a monitoring application exposes the data via a REST web service. A proof‑of‑concept implementation demonstrated the SHS’s key capabilities and novel features, marking a significant advance over the current state of the art.

Abstract

Over the last few years, the convincing forward steps in the development of Internet of Things (IoT)-enabling solutions are spurring the advent of novel and fascinating applications. Among others, mainly radio frequency identification (RFID), wireless sensor network (WSN), and smart mobile technologies are leading this evolutionary trend. In the wake of this tendency, this paper proposes a novel, IoT-aware, smart architecture for automatic monitoring and tracking of patients, personnel, and biomedical devices within hospitals and nursing institutes. Staying true to the IoT vision, we propose a smart hospital system (SHS), which relies on different, yet complementary, technologies, specifically RFID, WSN, and smart mobile, interoperating with each other through a Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)/IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area network (6LoWPAN)/representational state transfer (REST) network infrastructure. The SHS is able to collect, in real time, both environmental conditions and patients' physiological parameters via an ultra-low-power hybrid sensing network (HSN) composed of 6LoWPAN nodes integrating UHF RFID functionalities. Sensed data are delivered to a control center where an advanced monitoring application (MA) makes them easily accessible by both local and remote users via a REST web service. The simple proof of concept implemented to validate the proposed SHS has highlighted a number of key capabilities and aspects of novelty, which represent a significant step forward compared to the actual state of the art.