An IoT-inspired cloud-based web service architecture for e-health applications

E-Health services can take advantage of the technological achievements in the area of the Internet of Things (IoT), and of the cost reduction and increasing user-friendliness of health monitoring devices. Homes equipped with environmental sensors, physiological parameters monitoring devices, and home automation devices, could become the “hardware” of an “operating system” for application developers and service providers. The system would expose web services through a unique cloud infrastructure for users' data collection and storage, administration and billing, and healthcare service provisioning applications by possibly multiple third parties. We present an instance of a cloud-based web server which relies on a “home system” for the collection of information from an heterogeneous set of devices, providing a high level description of the proposed overall architectural model, of the induced opportunities from the market perspective, and of how it could be used by healthcare applications developers and service providers, including details on how the web server Application Programming Interfaces (API) is implemented in our instance.