The use of standards in embedded devices to achieve end to end semantic interoperability on health systems

Abstract

Nowadays, an approach to improve the quality of medical services is the semantic interoperability, and to achieve it, physiological transducers descriptors and data from physiological transducers need to be shared and understood in the same way by Medical Information Systems (MIS), the importance of the physiological transducers in medical environment and at home healthcare monitoring is growing; they provide physiological data, such as body temperature, glucose level, blood pressure, among other parameters to improve medical services. This is the reason why this work proposes the integration of HL7 V3, a standard of Health Level 7 (HL7) family and a second family of standards named IEEE1451; the latter manages smart transducers and the definition of Transducer Electronic Data Sheets (TEDS). To achieve semantic interoperability, a message template is proposed which includes date, physiological transducer sample, basic TEDS, transducers template identifier, a link to the complete TEDS, among other important features from physiological samples. As a case of study here, the HL7 V3 - IEEE1451 TEDS message defined by the template is sent by an application implemented on a network gateway NXP’s Tower System to a remote server recipient. This way, the main contributions of this paper are: i) the design and implementation of a message template that integrate HL7 V3 and IEEE1451 standards into an embedded gateway device NXP’s tower system; and ii) a testbed based on embedded devices to show that it is possible to achieve end to end semantic interoperability.