Bringing IoT and Cloud Computing towards Pervasive Healthcare Charalampos Doukas Dept. of Information & Communication Systems Engineering University of the Aegean Samos, Greece doukas@aegean.gr Ilias Maglogiannis Dept. of Computer Science & Biomedical Informatics University of Central Greece Lamia, Greece imaglo@ucg.gr Abstract—Pervasive healthcare applications utilizing body sensor networks generate a vast amount of data that need to be managed and stored for processing and future usage. Cloud computing among with the Internet of Things (IoT) concept is a new trend for efficient managing and processing of sensor data online. This paper presents a platform based on Cloud Computing for management of mobile and wearable healthcare sensors, demonstrating this way the IoT paradigm applied on pervasive healthcare. Keywords: Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Computing, Patient Monitoring, Wearable Sensors I. INTRODUCTION The introduction of the pervasive healthcare paradigm has enabled the awareness towards the independent living of elderly people and the need for constant medical supervision of chronic patients or habitants at remote, isolated or underserved locations. In this context, advanced electronic healthcare services are required to be made available through a network anytime, anyplace and to anyone. A medical assistive environment on the other hand concerns the utilization of pervasive and ubiquitous technologies for delivering the above services. Wireless technologies enable the real time transmission of data about a patient’s condition to caregivers. Numerous portable devices are available that can detect certain medical conditions—pulse rate, blood pressure, breath alcohol level, and so on—from a user’s touch. However this development and deployment of health information management through mobile devices introduces several challenges: data storage and management (e.g., physical storage issues, availability and maintenance), interoperability and availability of heterogeneous resources, security and privacy (e.g., permission control, data anonymity, etc.), unified and ubiquitous access are a few to mention One potential solution for addressing all aforementioned issues is the introduction of Cloud Computing concept in electronic healthcare systems. Cloud Computing provides the facility to access shared resources and common infrastructure in a ubiquitous and transparent way, offering services on-demand, over the network, and performing operations that meet changing needs. Figure 1 illustrates the Cloud Computing concept. Figure 1. An illustration of the Cloud Computing concept. All kinds of computing and communication devices are able to interact with the Cloud and share the same data resources. Embedded - sensor devices and microcontrollers are such way a part of the Cloud. In addition, the advance of machine-to-machine communication (M2M) enables the direct interaction of pervasive healthcare sensors with the Internet and by extension with Cloud Computing systems. This communication with the Internet has been recently introduced as the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT). IoT utilizes specific protocols for inter-device and Internet communication, provides real time access to device information and allows the remote management of the devices. It also features web applications that are scalable, accessible globally and provide communication interfaces to external applications. In the case of healthcare monitoring the IoT has already been proposed as an infrastructure for medical sensor communication ([23] - [24]). In this context we have developed a Cloud-based system that manages sensor data. Wearable – textile sensors collect biosignals from the user (like heart rate, ECG, oxygen saturation and temperature), motion data (through accelerometers) and contextual data (like location, ambient temperature, activity status, etc.). Depending on the wireless technology used, the data can be forwarded to a mobile phone or directly to the Cloud infrastructure utilizing established techniques for IoT communication. Appropriate 2012 Sixth International Conference on Innovative Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing 978-0-7695-4684-1/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE DOI 10.1109/IMIS.2012.26 922