Continua: The reference architecture of a personal telehealth ecosystem

The Continua Health Alliance, which was started in 2006 to enable an interoperable personal telehealth ecosystem, has become a major force in the personal telehealth domain. Within one year after the release of the Version One Design Guidelines over a dozen interoperable products have been officially Continua Certified and many more are coming. In parallel Continua continued its technical developments and has since made great progress on defining interoperability for the LAN and WAN interfaces, and with that now enables end-to-end interoperability. In this paper we motivate why the establishment of such an ecosystem is an essential part in addressing the healthcare challenges in society and why it is essential to address interoperability. The paper introduces the Continua Health Alliance and describes in detail the Continua end-to-end architecture and guidelines, including its security aspects.