In the last few years, many advances in sensing usage have been developed, and their application on healthcare is substantially growing due to many factors, but the most important one is the patient's physical parameters data gathering for remote monitorization and intervention. Sensing and actuation as a service using clouds as basis may provide a platform to directly connect the patient's sensors to the health care providers and fast monitor or intervene in case of alarm, especially on elderly people. In Portugal, all patient's data is collected to a personal patient data register (health portal), that can be seen by any medical and technical health staff working on public institutions. This study aims to design a framework using sensing and actuation as a service on clouds able to provide data integration into the Portuguese National Patient Data Register and alarm triggering for fast medical intervention.
TopIntroduction
The internet of things (IoT) it’s a collection of Things (sensors, cellphones, GPS locators, RFID systems or other smart objects) that are identifiable, trackable, and connected to the internet, providing a large scale of information access.
Different protocol stacks and ecosystems were developed for IoT, resulting in a communication incompatibility, contributing for a fragmented scenario without middleware gateways. Web-of-Things emerged from this scenario to provide connection between Things using web technologies, enabling their access, discovery and management (Fortino et al., 2017; Guinard et al., 2016).
Due to the huge amount of data generated from all constraint devices (Things) connected that can be accessed and managed from the internet, new challenges occur in storage and processing all data. Cloud computing, which is a set of architectures and models that concentrate software and hardware resources, offering them as-a-Service to users, such as Platform as-a-Service (PaaS) which provides computer platforms that can include operating system, programming languages, databases, web servers, and other environments, Software as-a-Service (SaaS) where the cloud manages the infrastructure and a software may be deployed for client usage or Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS) that aims to provide virtual machines, servers, storage, load balancers scalable and redundant depending on users requests, could be the answer to these questions (Guerreiro et al., 2019).
Sensing as-a-Service (Se-aaS) surfaced from this scenario to respond to these challenges as a business model, allowing sensor owners to share data into a cloud of sensor Things to be collected by data consumers, paying it as-a-service. The authors Distefano et al. (2012), presented a step towards to a creation of a Cloud of sensors and actuators (devices and/or cloud can perform actions), by introducing an architectural scheme that responded to the challenges using smart devices, Sensing and Actuation as-a-Service (SAaaS).
The Portuguese Health Ministry created a Health Portal on which all public medical and health technical staff can access patient’s data, exams, reports, and analysis performed inside the Nacional Health System (NHS) Institutions, so that when someone is attended anywhere in the country, all health professionals can access the data registered, diminishing costs, being more effective and productive. This platform is essential for patients and medical staff to visualize patient’s medical data, but only the ones registered on public NHS Institutions, there is no connection to private health institutions.
Nowadays, the aging of population and growing life expectation is a serious concern to all national health systems, not only to create health conditions in the health system but to provide care to elder people. In Portugal, the aging index grow from 27.5% in 1961 to 182.7% in 2021 (Pordata, 2022), being essential to create conditions to promote health and wellbeing, increasing functional capacity, autonomy, and life quality to people while they are aging.
Many studies have been addressing the connection of sensors and technology to the aging, such as remote health monitoring, fall detection and elder surveillance.
This study intends to propose the design of a preliminary framework model which allows the connection between all Things that can remote monitor, detect and actuate in elder’s health, retrieving and integrating data into the Health Portal System to be available to all medical and technical staff anywhere in Portugal.
The proposed framework model is suitable for IoT SAaaS business models, supporting multi-sensing client applications and multi-sensor supplier’s deployment, Thing’s mashups, and multiple domains integration.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. In section Cloud-Based Sensing and Actuation as-a-Service the main system architectures and functionalities are discussed. Section Related Work discusses the work done on the connection between sensor systems and elders health. Section Framework Model presents the design of the framework model proposed to interconnect all Things into the Portuguese Health Portal and section Conclusion, concludes the article.