Pervasive healthcare services have undergone a great evolution in recent years. The technological development of communication networks, including the Internet, sensor networks, and M2M (Machine-to-Machine) have given rise to new architectures, applications, and standards related to addressing almost all current e-health challenges. Among the standards, the importance of OpenEHR has been recognized, since it enables the separation of medical semantics from data representation of electronic health records. However, it does not meet the requirements related to interoperability of e-health devices in M2M networks, or in the Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. Moreover, the lack of interoperability hampers the application of new data-processing techniques, such as data mining and online analytical processing, due to the heterogeneity of the data and the sources. This article proposes an Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) platform for pervasive healthcare that ensures interoperability, quality of the detection process, and scalability in an M2M-based architecture, and provides functionalities for the processing of high volumes of data, knowledge extraction, and common healthcare services. The platform uses the semantics described in OpenEHR for both data quality evaluation and standardization of healthcare data stored by the association of IoMT devices and observations defined in OpenEHR. Moreover, it enables the application of big data techniques and online analytic processing (OLAP) through Hadoop Map/Reduce and content-sharing through fast healthcare interoperability resource (FHIR) application programming interfaces (APIs).
Keywords: FHIR; IoMT; M2M; OpenEHR; data mining; data warehouse; e-Health; pervasive healthcare; semantic interoperability.