Abstract
The development of electronic health records, wearable devices, health applications and Internet of Things (IoT)-empowered smart homes is promoting various applications. It also makes health self-management much more feasible, which can partially mitigate one of the challenges that the current healthcare system is facing. Effective and convenient self-management of health requires the collaborative use of health data and home environment data from different services, devices, and even open data on the Web. Although health data interoperability standards including HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and IoT ontology including Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) have been developed and promoted, it is impossible for all the different categories of services to adopt the same standard in the near future. This study presents a method that applies Semantic Web technologies to integrate the health data and home environment data from heterogeneously built services and devices. We propose a Web Ontology Language (OWL)-based integration ontology that models health data from HL7 FHIR standard implemented services, normal Web services and Web of Things (WoT) services and Linked Data together with home environment data from formal ontology-described WoT services. It works on the resource integration layer of the layered integration architecture. An example use case with a prototype implementation shows that the proposed method successfully integrates the health data and home environment data into a resource graph. The integrated data are annotated with semantics and ontological links, which make them machine-understandable and cross-system reusable.
Highlights
The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) is changing people’s lives and their integration with the surrounding environment
We propose a Web Ontology Language (OWL)-based integration ontology that models health data from HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard implemented services, normal Web services and Web of Things (WoT) services and Linked Data together with home environment data from formal ontology-described WoT services
The work in this paper proposes a method, which follows the path of FHIR to apply Semantic
Summary
The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) is changing people’s lives and their integration with the surrounding environment. The integration method aims to semantically link the health services and WoT devices that adopted HL7 FHIR, described by formal ontologies, implemented RESTful Web APIs or published as Linked Data, i.e., services with different levels of interoperability. It is to make the integration method compatible with the real-world service environment. The heterogeneous data are modeled as conceptual information resources by using the Linked Health Resources (LHR) ontology It makes the entire method as a consolidated framework that aggregates health and home environment data from different sources and integrates them as a data resource graph, in the way of RDF, for upper-level collaborative use.
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