Modular and Personalized Smart Health Application Design in a Smart City Environment

TLDR: The modular approach for IoT applications—the context engine—to smart health problems is applied, enabling the ability to grow with available data, use general-purpose machine learning, and reduce compute redundancy and complexity.

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) envisions to create a smart, connected city that is composed of ubiquitous environmental and user sensing along with distributed, low-capacity computing. This provides ample information regarding the citizens in various smart environments. We can leverage this people-centric information, provided by the smart city infrastructure, to improve “smart health” applications: user data from connected wearable devices can be accompanied with ubiquitous environmental sensing and versatile actuation. The state-of-the-art in smart health applications is black-box, end-to-end implementations which are neither intended for use with heterogeneous data nor adaptable to a changing set of sensing and actuation. In this paper, we apply our modular approach for IoT applications—the context engine—to smart health problems, enabling the ability to grow with available data, use general-purpose machine learning, and reduce compute redundancy and complexity. For smart health, this improves response times for critical situations, more efficient identification of health-related conditions and subsequent actuation in a smart city environment. We demonstrate the potential with three sets of interconnected context-aware applications, extracting health-related people-centric context, such as user presence, user activity, air quality, and location from IoT sensors.