Contextual activity based Healthcare Internet of Things, Services, and People (HIoTSP): An architectural framework for healthcare monitoring using wearable sensors

Abstract Healthcare industry is gaining a lot of attention due to its technological advancement and the miniaturization in the form of wearable sensors. IoT-driven healthcare industry has mainly focused on the integration of sensors rather than the integration of services and people. Nonetheless, the framework for IoT-driven healthcare applications are significantly lacking. In addition, the use of semantics for ontological reasoning and the integration of mobile applications into a single framework have also been ignored in many existing studies. This work presents the implementation of Healthcare Internet of Things, Services, and People (HIoTSP) framework using wearable sensor technology. It is designed to achieve the low-cost (consumer devices), the easiness to use (interface), and the pervasiveness (wearable sensors) for healthcare monitoring along with the integration of services and agents like doctors or caregivers. The proposed framework provides the functionalities for data acquisition from wearable sensors, contextual activity recognition, automatic selection of services and applications, user interface, and value-added services such as alert generation, recommendations, and visualization. We used the publicly available dataset, PAMAP2 which is a physical activity monitoring dataset, for deriving the contextual activity. Fall and stress detection services are implemented as case studies for validating the realization of the proposed framework. Experimental analysis shows that we achieve, 87.16% accuracy for low-level contextual activities and 84.06%–86.36% for high-level contextual activities, respectively. We also achieved 91.68% and 82.93% accuracies for fall and stress detection services, respectively. The result is quite satisfactory, considering that all these services have been implemented using pervasive devices with the low-sampling rate. The real-time applicability of the proposed framework is validated by performing the response time analysis for both the services. We also provide suggestions to cope with the scalability and security issues using the HIoTSP framework and we intend to implement those suggestions in our future work.