Research Benefits of Using Interoperability Standards in Remote Command and Control to Implement Personal Health Devices

The initial heterogeneity in the development of Personal Health Devices (PHDs) highlighted the lack of interoperability between agents and managers. The standardization work of the PHD Working Group (PHD-WG) has recently adapted the ISO/IEEE 11073 interoperability standard (X73), initially oriented to clinical environments, to include Personal Health Devices (X73PHD) communications. This new evolution allows the development of interoperable personal health ecosystems. At the moment of this writing, more than 11 specializations have been successfully published by the Personal Health Device (PHD) Working Group (PHD-WG). This new standard brings benefits to both technology producers (design cost reduction, experience sharing, marketing, etc.) and technology consumers (plug-and-play, accessibility, ease to integration, prices, etc.). Nevertheless, some recent specializations at draft stage show the need for a procedure to command and control configuration parameters and settings, which could provide additional benefits such as configurability from the cloud. As a solution, some ad-hoc methods have been elaborated to deal with, although the aim of the PHD-WG is to standardize a general procedure, valid for longer term. Therefore, it is needed to identify use cases requiring remote configuration services. This work identifies and studies new use cases that employ remote configuration services. The resulting use cases, discussed within the PHD-WG to get the maximum consensus, are related to the Basic Electrocardiograph (X73-10406), the Sleep Apnea Breathing Therapy Equipment (X73-10424), and the Medication Monitor (X73-10472) specializations. In addition, a classification of the findings is proposed for each use case. These findings could be the basis for the new remote configuration extension package.