HeDI: Healthcare Device Interoperability for IoT-Based e-Health Platforms

In this work, we propose and develop healthcare device interoperability (HeDI)—a system to enable device interoperability in IoT-enabled in-home healthcare monitoring platforms. The system consists of multiple sensors, each connected wirelessly to an edge device, acting as a wireless communication gateway to a remote server. The system initiates information handshaking between the sensor adapters and edge device at the beginning of the operation, which is later used to detect the sensor settings to process the data received from the sensor. The system is scalable and dynamically accommodates multiple sensors without any predefined ontologies at the edge device. The implementation of our system avoids dependencies on a system’s physical ports. The low form factor and wireless connectivity of the adapter make the system portable and convenient for in-home health monitoring. Additionally, the system allows multiple homogeneous sensors to operate at the same time in the same system. We implement and evaluate our system with a 3-lead ECG, pulse, and temperature sensors against two different network configurations—star and mesh. We use the data set generated from our implemented system for performance analysis. The network-level analysis of our system shows an average packet delivery ratio of 0.92 for star network configuration and 0.98 for mesh network configuration, ensuring the reliability of performance and its suitability for healthcare monitoring systems.