CyPhyS+: A Reliable and Managed Cyber-Physical System for Old-Age Home Healthcare over a 6LoWPAN Using Wearable Motes

Abstract

We present design and implementation of CyPhyS+, a comprehensive, low-cost and standards compliant Cyber-Physical System (CPS) using 6LoWPAN based Internet of Things for remote health monitoring of elderly staying in old-age homes. It is a closed-loop system that incorporates an end-toend reliable message transfer scheme for the resource constrained environment, data security, real-time medical signal processing and data analytics, and FHIR/HL7 compliant web services. The low power operation of CyPhyS+ allows the CPS an extended uptime, ensuring connectivity to the medical sensors, via the Internet, anytime/anywhere. The end-to-end reliable and secure messaging mechanism of CyPhyS+ does not necessitate intermediate application end-points at the old-age homes. This enables easy deployment with low operational overheads, scalability as well as easy introduction of newer applications or application upgrades. The paper describes system architecture, design and implementation details of software and hardware sub-systems. HealthMote, a power efficient Bluetooth-6LoWPAN mote was designed and deployed as a sub-system. We describe the novel low power end-to-end multi-stage message reliability scheme for UDP based sensor applications that does not require intermediate application-aware devices within the network. The experimental results presented show the efficacy of the approach. CyPhyS+ employs an application performance aware SNMP based network monitoring for robust operations of the 6LoWPAN multihop network. It incorporates a 128-bit AES, CBC-MAC based encryption and authentication mechanism for security and privacy. CyPhyS+ is compliant with FHIR/HL7 standards framework, with support for RESTful FHIR, and medical data analytics of ECG. We report on the extensive field trials carried out across a city.

Internet of Medical Things: A Review of Recent Contributions Dealing With Cyber-Physical Systems in Medicine

“…Then, verification and validation of IoMT-based systems was also an independently considered subject. These papers mainly focused on the real life testing of networked IoMT devices, such as the field verification of a sensor networked using the 6LoWPAN protocol and aimed at the remote monitoring of elderly subjects [70], the experimental evaluation of the synchronization of two IoMT nodes [71], or the testing of Zigbee based networked sensor aiming to be integrated in a wider health structure for post-stroke rehabilitation [72].…”

“…Networked architectures, as described in the previous section, raise the question of machine-to-machine communication and standardization. To allow seamless communications between CPS devices, one must carefully study how these devices communicate using standard communication protocol such as 6LoWPAN [70], MAC [85] or IEEE 802.15.4 [102] in strict IoMT contexts and more generic CPS contexts. However, the machine-to-machine communication concern is wider than simple protocol matters.…”

A Comparative Analysis of Network Management Protocols in IoT Applications

“…Power consumption is a great concern when it comes to embedded devices applied to IoT. Several researches focus on this aspect with the aim of saving the energy consumed by these restrict devices (Atzori et al, 2010;Feng et al, 2011;Dagale et al, 2015).…”

A Remote Health Monitoring System for Elderly Living in Old-Age Home

“…CyPhyS+ is a Reliable and Managed Cyber-Physical System for Old-age Home [5]. They consider two usage models: Individual-centric healthcare and Community-centric healthcare services, which independently or in a combination provide efficient remote health monitoring services to the elderly.…”