Smart-CARE: Integrating Context Awareness into Smart Health Systems

The various domains of the Internet of Things (IoT), in particular healthcare systems, have seen exponential growth thanks to continuous technological advances, resulting in lower costs for communication and smart devices. This is driving healthcare systems towards smart healthcare systems. This means intelligent applications capable of processing large heterogeneous amounts of data to improve people's quality of life. However, these smart applications usually only use information from their own domain, excluding the possibility of further contextualization by using data from other domains. Various systems have been proposed recently, but the lack of common criteria for defining, integrating and correlating data has hindered better contextualization of smart applications. Different structures for defining data in IoT and smart health systems have been approached, but they are either too specific to a single domain or too general, making it impossible to describe domain information according to the needs of a variety of scenarios. Our goal in this chapter is to show how current smart health systems can benefit from the use of a recently presented taxonomy and software architecture, which are part of a framework for IoT and smart environments. According to this proposal, it is possible to define data from different domains by using the proposed taxonomy. While with the use of the proposed software architecture it is possible to integrate and correlate these data from different domains thanks to the use of real-time complex event processing. The proposed solution has been illustrated with a case study to demonstrate its feasibility.