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3 Unleashing the potential of the Internet of Things

6.3.1 Healthcare applications

A healthcare application continuously monitors the location and the health status of the persons
within the range of a sensor network in buildings, in order to handle possible emergencies. See
Figure 1. Every resident wears a sensor node on his/her wrist, which looks like a wristwatch. The
sensor node senses body temperature, pulse, momentum, and electrocardiogram (ECG) of the
resident and then periodically transmits the sensed data to the USN application. A healthcare
application displays the current location and health condition of the resident based on the sensed
data.

Bedroom
Police station

Bathroom

USN Application
Gateway
middleware server
Hospital

Living room

Kitchen
Family

Temperature sensor F.744(09)_F01.doc
Pressure sensor
Pulse sensor
Sensor node ECG sensor

Figure 1 – Use case of a healthcare service

A healthcare application needs residents' medical histories and medical background to provide
context-aware service for each resident. Based on the medical background, context-aware rules can
be created. Context-aware rules take sensed data and residents' medical histories as inputs and issue
emergency notifications when certain emergency conditions are met. Emergency notifications are
delivered to the related authorities such as a hospital, a police station and the relatives or family to
handle the situation appropriately. The steps are as follows:

Step 1: Managers or operators of a healthcare application should generate appropriate rules
based on the medical background to process context-aware information. For services
tailored to the individual, the rules need to take residents' medical histories as inputs.
Step 2: Each resident wears a sensor node on his/her wrist. After being turned on, each sensor
node senses body temperature, pulse, momentum, and ECG and then periodically sends
that sensed data to USN middleware.
Step 3: When a sensor network tries to connect to USN middleware, the USN middleware
authenticates the connecting sensor network to protect itself against deceptive sensor
networks.

152 Rec. ITU-T Y.4104/F.744 (12/2009)