ORIGINAL RESEARCH A context-aware data fusion approach for health-IoT Zartasha Baloch 1 • Faisal Karim Shaikh 1 • Mukhtiar Ali Unar 1 Received: 11 December 2017 / Accepted: 16 February 2018 Ó Bharati Vidyapeeth’s Institute of Computer Applications and Management 2018 Abstract The technological advances in low-cost sensor devices and communication technologies bring rapid increase in development of smart homes and smart envi- ronments. The developments in wireless sensor networks (WSN), body area networks (BAN), cloud computing and big data technologies trigger the use of Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare industry. This poses many challenges such as heterogeneous data fusion, context-awareness, complex query processing, reliability and accuracy etc. Data fusion techniques are used to extract meaningful information from heterogeneous IoT data. It combines individual data from sensor sources to collectively obtain a result, which is more reliable, accurate and complete. Apart from wearable sensors, additional context sensors need to be added to build a context. Health IoT applications has potential benefits of using context-aware data fusion. By using context information, the behavior of the application can be customized according to the specific situation. This paper provides a brief concept of context-aware data fusion and includes data management approach for context-aware systems for healthcare applications. Finally, a context- aware data fusion approach for health IoT is proposed. It includes context acquisition, situation building and rea- soning and inference. Keywords Data fusion Á Context-awareness Á Healthcare Á Internet of Things 1 Introduction Internet of Things (IoT) is trending technology that attracts many researchers around the world. It helps to make our daily life more intelligent and smart by interconnecting physical objects. The main concept of IoT is the pervasive presence of a variety of things (objects) around us, which can interact with each other and collaborate with their neighboring objects to achieve common target [1]. IoT is a multidisciplinary field, which may include but not limited to embedded systems, electronics, wireless sensor networks, communication networks, and computing paradigms. IoT serves as an umbrella above these tech- nologies, which diversifies its applications area. Its appli- cations include smart cities, smart homes/smart buildings, environment monitoring, smart business and product management, emergency response systems, intelligent transportation, security and surveillance, energy and industrial automation, and healthcare etc. [2]. The continuous growth of IoT projects towards its adaptation by diverse industries, even low cost organiza- tions are also feeling the effects. For the reason, IoT needs its own dedicated wide area network. Typically, wide area networks require larger batteries or continuous power supply, which is not feasible in all the situations. The development of low power wide area (LPWA) networks is solution to this challenge, which provides benefits includ- ing reduced total cost of ownership, increased battery life, and long coverage range. Keith et al. [3] discussed basics of low power wide area (LPWA) networks for IoT and provides a survey of two LPWA technologies, namely LoRa technology by Semtech and ultra-narrow band solutions by SigFox, in terms of physical layer and medium access control layer. Konstantin et al. [4] analyzed the capacity and scalability of LoRa wide area networks. On & Zartasha Baloch zartasha.baloch@faculty.muet.edu.pk 1 Mehran University of Engineering and Technology, Jamshoro, Pakistan 123 Int. j. inf. tecnol. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41870-018-0116-1