A pragmatic approach to solving IoT interoperability and security problems in an eHealth context

In this article we present the experimental results of an innovation-driven collaborative project in the eHealth domain that aims to create a product for the remote monitoring of elderly people in their own homes or inside proper care-homes or hospitals. In particular, we focus on how we solved the challenges of integrating a number of components into an architecture for an overall IoT platform that i. remotely monitors elderly people through heterogeneous wearable and positioning technologies; ii. processes produced data to generate alarms; iii. delivers, through an IoT broker, data-streams with fine-grained access control; iv. displays data to their owners and allowed contacts / doctors through simple web-based applications. These integration results, driven by concrete requirements, are about to be applied in 13 different trials across Europe. We illustrate lessons learnt in the implementation of an interoperable IoT data broker and a set of pragmatic choices made in the integration of newly designed and existing services (components in the afore-mentioned architecture). The contents of this article, rather than illustrating a scientific breakthrough, advance the state-of-the-art by providing a reference guide for a scalable API-based solution-design that lowers the IoT interoperability barriers and addresses secure and privacy concerns when dealing with sensitive data.