IoT Communication Protocols in Healthcare

Abstract

This report is the result of a master’s thesis with the goal of investigating which are the most commonly used Internet of Things protocols in healthcare and creating a working prototype for integration of at least one of them. The investigation made it clear that the only serious attempt at standardising communication amongst medical devices in the IoT realm is the ISO/IEEE 11073 protocols family. Thus the integration is made to support this protocol family. The definition, creation and testing of the integration are described in this report. Through the integration, Bluetooth enabled personal health devices using the ISO/IEEE 11073-20601 messaging protocol can communicate with web services, using the Open Data protocol. The integration consists of an Android application functioning as a gateway for the personal health devices and an example web service that can receive measurements from pulse oximeters and store them in a database. The gateway application is built using an MVC pattern, to make it easy to modify and extend, and it relies on the Antidote library to decode the ISO/IEEE 11073-20601 messages. Because the web service uses the Open Data protocol, which includes an easy-to-use querying interface, it is easy to use it for further integration. The system definition focuses on healthcare use and is trying to be as complete as possible for a project of this size, whereas the implemented gateway and web service software serve as a proof-of-concept. They show the possibility to integrate IoT pulse oximeters with a web service using an open protocol. This makes the documentation, in the form of scenarios, user stories and requirements, a good basis for developing a full-fledged integration, supporting all device specialisations, and the proof-of-concept a good base for this full integration.