From edge to cloud: Design and implementation of a healthcare internet of things infrastructure

Lately, the advancement in circuit technology combined with the design of low cost embedded devices have resulted in an infiltration of the latter into everyday humans’ lives. To exploit the full potential of ubiquitous embedded devices, a network is used for their inter-communication, offering advanced real-time monitoring. This paradigm, known as Internet of Things (IoT), is steadily consolidated and promises to offer a wide variety of applications. However, with the adoption of IoT, new challenges arise, such as the design of architectures able to support the requirements of the new applications. Towards this goal, we explore a three layered architecture, able to acquire, process and store Healthcare data as well as to provide real-time decision making. We use ECG signal arrhythmia detection as our use case evaluation scenario, and compare different techniques for wireless communication, storage and data classification. Experimental results show that, our architecture provides real-time decision making, with an average delay of 15 μs and that different communication technologies achieved to provide up to 10% lower power consumption on the monitoring devices