Abstract
In the era of smart devices and connected neighborhoods, the ubiquitous monitoring and care of patients are possible with the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). Smart healthcare devices may serve their purpose well when they are able to share patient's data with each other. However, data formats vary widely across vendors, rendering these devices not interoperable. Recent solutions mostly rely on cloud services where a source device uploads the data, and the sink devices download it conforming to their own native formats. However, the quality of service is expected to deteriorate in a cloud processing regime with inherent network delays and traffic congestion, and the real-time data acquisition and manipulation is, therefore, not possible. This article presents MeDIC, a framework of Medical Data Interoperability through Collaboration of healthcare devices. MeDIC improves over a cloud-based IoMT by utilizing translation resources at the network edge, with its probing and translating agents. The probing agents maintain a capability list of MeDIC devices within a local network and enable one MeDIC device to request data conversion from another device when the former is not capable of this conversion by itself. The translating agent of the later then converts the data into the required format and returns it to the former. These novel agents allow IoMT devices to share their redundant computing resources for data translations in order to minimize cloud accesses. Legacy devices are supported through MeDIC-enabled, fog resource managers. We evaluate MeDIC in four use cases with rigorous simulations, which prove that this collaborative framework not only reduces the uplink traffic but also improves the response time, which is critical in real-time medical applications.
Highlights
The continuous advancements in information and communication technologies in the past decade have given rise to the ubiquitous Internet of Things (IoT) [1]
Some vendors are sourcing interoperability devices, like HealthGO Hubs [15] and ELIOT hubs [16], which support a subset of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) protocols, and the medical data which they acquire is available through their proprietary, cloud-based services
EVALUATION The MeDIC is evaluated by extending an open-source IoT simulator, iFogSim [59], which enables the quantification of various performance metrics of cloud, edge- or fog-based IoT frameworks
Summary
The continuous advancements in information and communication technologies in the past decade have given rise to the ubiquitous Internet of Things (IoT) [1]. Some vendors are sourcing interoperability devices, like HealthGO Hubs [15] and ELIOT hubs [16], which support a subset of IoMT protocols, and the medical data which they acquire is available through their proprietary, cloud-based services These hubs are generally limited to vertical integration of healthcare services, including remote patient monitoring and remote configuration (of healthcare devices) and lack a real-time, horizontal collaboration through direct data transactions among these devices [9]. To achieve data interoperability in real-time within an IoMT, these fog and edge computing devices are needed to be interwoven with the help of a collaborative and distributed framework, to enable the horizontal integration in Industry 4.0 [9].
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