Design of a RESTful Middleware to Enable a Web of Medical Things N. Philip, T. Butt, D. Sobnath, R. Kayyali, S. Nabhani- Gebara and B. Pierscionek Digital Media for Health Research Group, MINT center, Faculty of Science, Engineering and Computing, Kingston University, Surrey, UK, n.philip@kingston.ac.uk I. Chouvarda, V. Kilintis, P. Natsiavas and N. Maglaveras Lab of Medical Informatics, Aristotle University Thessaloniki, Greece. ioanna@med.auth.gr A. Raptopoulos Exus Athens, Greece, arap@exus.co.uk The WELCOME Consortium* Abstract— In this paper, we consider the design methodology of a mobile patient hub for the remote self-management of COPD patients. The patient hub design forms a part of the WELCOME system. WELCOME is a current EU project that aims to design and develop a new mobile health system to provide integrated care for COPD patients with comorbidities. The approach adopted for this research is based on the Web of Things architecture with RESTful principles as the enabler of communications. The proposed patient hub architecture design is based on three layers: an application layer, a middleware layer and the sensors layer. This paper presents the detail of the initial design of the middleware and an analysis of the architecture in the context of the system’s requirements. Keywords-component; COPD; Patient-hub; mhealth; Web of Things; RESTful; Integrated care; WELCOME project; PAN; BAN; I. INTRODUCTION Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a chronic condition that requires integrated care and a collaborative multidisciplinary approach to its management. WELCOME is a European project to design and develop a mobile health system that provides such a care approach for COPD patients. In particular, WELCOME is based on wearable sensing and cloud computing to provide proactive and patient-centered remote self-management for COPD patients with co-morbidities (www.wecome-project.eu ) [1]. One of the main building blocks of the WELCOME system is the patient hub, which represents a mobile platform that includes all of the software and hardware components that interact with the patient and the sensors, including: a) a unified data-acquisition application to collect the medical data from the medical sensors and then format, prepare and submit those data to the WELCOME cloud, and b) interactive applications to collect information and present users with the results, including alarms, motivation messages, and guidelines for the patient in intuitive ways with a capability of providing feedback, etc. Figure 1 depicts the overall patient hub functionality, including the foreseen connections with the different types of sensing devices. The connection between the patient-hub resources (e.g., the patient’s applications and the medical sensors) to the cloud will be based on the RESTful paradigm [2]. In such an architecture, all of the acquired data from the medical sensors and the applications will be treated as Web resources and, hence, a Web of Things architecture will be created. As shown in Figure 1, the WELCOME Application Hosting Device (WAHD) will host the patient’s hub software platform that will be able to access the patient’s applications on the WELCOME cloud. On the other hand, communicating with the medical sensors (e.g., the glucose meter, BP, weight scale and the temperature sensors) via the Bluetooth (BT) API, while communicating with the Vest and the Inhaler via the Peer-to- Peer (P2P) Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) APIs. Figure 1. Patient hub of the WELCOME system. This paper presents the initial design of the patient hub for the WELCOME system with a great emphasis on the proposed middleware layer. Driven by this Web-of-Things (WoT) vision, the proposed platform architecture can be divided into three layers: an application layer, a middleware layer and a sensors layer. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section II presents a summary of related work. Section III identifies the user and system requirements. Section IV describes the proposed system architecture for the middleware. Finally, section V concludes the paper and summarises the ongoing work. II. RELATED WORK Existing literature contains a plethora of research efforts offering middleware solutions with varied scopes [3]. The main goal of most of the existing middleware systems and research projects was to build a unified adaptation layer framework to support the important needs of the respective MOBIHEALTH 2014, November 03-05, Athens, Greece Copyright © 2014 ICST DOI 10.4108/icst.mobihealth.2014.257408