An IoT-Aware Architecture for Smart Healthcare Systems

Abstract

Over the last few years, the convincing forward steps in the development of Internet-of-Things (IoT) enabling solutions are spurring the advent of novel and fascinating applications. Among others, mainly Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), and smart mobile technologies are leading this evolutionary trend.In the wake of this tendency, this paper proposes a novel, IoTaware, smart architecture for automatic monitoring and tracking of patients, personnel, and biomedical devices within hospitals and nursing institutes. Staying true to the IoT vision, we propose a Smart Hospital System (SHS) which relies on different, yet complementary, technologies, specifically RFID, WSN, and smart mobile, interoperating with each other through a CoAP/6LoWPAN/REST network infrastructure. The SHS is able to collect, in real time, both environmental conditions and patients' physiological parameters via an ultra-low-power Hybrid Sensing Network (HSN) composed of 6LoWPAN nodes integrating UHF RFID functionalities. Sensed data are delivered to a control center where an advanced monitoring application makes them easily accessible by both local and remote users via a REST web service. The simple proof of concept implemented to validate the proposed SHS has highlighted a number of key capabilities and aspects of novelty which represent a significant step forward compared to the actual state of art. support and improve healthcare and biomedical-related processes [2]. Automatic identification and tracking of people and biomedical devices in hospitals, correct drug-patient associations, real-time monitoring of patients' physiological parameters for early detection of clinical deterioration are only a few of the possible examples.Among others, Ultra-High-Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), and smart mobile represent three of the most promising technologies enabling the implementation of smart healthcare systems. RFID is a low-cost, low-power technology consisting of passive and/or battery-assisted passive (BAP) devices, named tags, which are able to transmit data when powered by the electromagnetic field generated by an interrogator, named reader. Since passive RFID tags do not need a source of energy to operate, their lifetime can be measured in decades, thus making the RFID technology well suited in a variety of application scenarios, including the healthcare one [3]- [5]. The recent availability of UHF RFID tags with increased capabilities, e.g. sensing and computation [6]-[8], represents a further added value. In fact, RFID-based sensing in healthcare enables zero-power, low-cost, and easyto-implement monitoring and transmission of patients' physiological parameters. Nevertheless, the main drawback of RFID tags stems from the fact that they can operate solely under the reader coverage region, i.e. up to 15 m and 25 m when respectively fully-passive and BAP tags are used. Clearly, such an aspect limits the use of UHF RFID technology to object/patient identific...

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