An Architectural Framework for HMIS based on Internet of Things

Abstract

Healthcare is very important factor in every body’s life and Information technology is playing an important role in providing better health with number of advancements. Internet of things (IoT) is an emerging technology. Due to its popularity in technology and internet world, IoT is rising in every field of life and so in health sector. Health is something in which its focus is more concentrated due to its hypnotic features. Till now, not much work has been done in hospitals related to IoT especially in Pakistan. The main issues is the lack of a standardized design. So in order to deal with the problems of existing system of hospitals at large scale, in this thesis we have proposed an architectural framework for hospitals based on internet of things. Moreover we have discussed the main technologies of IoT and conceptual smart hospital constructed with the understanding of architecture of IoT based hospital. The architecture and application framework for hospitals are also defined in detail. The proposed system shows an optimistic and confident result for the treatment and diagnostic approach in hospitals. As IoT is aimed to connect everything to Internet, there are billions of sensors which are attached to things to access data and connect these things to internet. So the data provided by these sensors is growing very fast. We need to handle this big data on personals gadgets as well on central databases. To deal with this problem, in this research we have also presented IoT based architectural framework with context awareness for hospital management systems. We have introduced context awareness as a middleware on IoT’s architecture above network layer to overcome the problem of data management. Patient’s data would be placed on a cloud and only the required information would be available on their personal gadgets like smart phones and laptops etc. We did a questionnaire based survey analysis of proposed framework to investigate the decision to adopt the IoT based system in Pakistani Hospitals. The accumulated results indicate that participants want to adopt this system and most of the population agreed that IoT based HMIS would provide better monitoring, communication and early diagnosis.