A CoAP-Based Smartphone Proxy for Healthcare with IoT Technologies

Smartphones play an increasingly important role in healthcare. At first there are many simple smartphone applications for giving advice to patients. Now healthcare is redesigned with promising technological, economic, and social prospects, because of Internet of Things(IoT)revolution. In term of IoT-based platform, smartphones serve as gateways or proxies in many healthcare platform architectures. They can communicate with sensors that monitor the patient's physical condition, and they can interact with remote clinicians and hospitals. but existing mobile healthcare platforms are using private protocols for communication and are not conducive to the standardization of the industry. We aim at changing the existing healthcare platforms to make the communication of healthcare platforms more uniform and compatible with the Internet. This paper proposed a novel change on existing mobile healthcare platforms, to make them more compatible with the Internet and World Wide Web. Affected by the Internet of Things, more and more specialized medical resources will be integrated and healthcare should not be fragmented and episodic. Instead of private and customized messages exchange between smartphone storage and server portal, uniform access to sensor messages is more acceptable and beneficial for unification of industrial standards. Constrained Application Protocol(CoAP)is a proper standard protocol established by IETF to promote it. In this paper, A CoAP-based smartphone proxy prototype is designed, implemented, and its end-to-end functionality is tested successfully. With the CoAP-based smartphone proxy prototype, medical sensors can be compatible with the Internet and interact with other nodes around the world through RESTful communication.