Standards for Sensor Technologies that Support Mobile Patient Health Monitoring in Resource Constrained Settings

Abstract

Diversity in vendors for sensor technologies requires standard, rules and regulations to stir development of interoperable healthcare sensor technologies. In addition, standards are needed for the successful deployment of any technology. Similarly, the success of global standards adoption or their harmonization to resource constrained context requires a mechanism for determining their suitability of use in a given implementation environment. However, there is limited understanding of requirements for standardization of sensor technologies that support healthcare in a resource-constrained environment. The study conducted a systematised review. 1,741 peer-reviewed articles published 2000-2018 were retrieved from IEEE Xplore and google scholar. However, only 25 of them and 8 grey literature that focused on interoperability of ehealth devices, sensors use in health, standards for ehealth, standards development and or standards selection. The study identified four key areas for standardisation of sensor technology i.e., the semantic data models, ontologies, interfaces, and protocols. Furthermore, we present the use case of standardized sensor technology suitable to support healthcare monitoring in a resource constrained setting. The study anticipates that sensor device resource constraints and constraints of the implementation environment influence the suitability of selected standards. Therefore, recommend that in addition to the focus on the standardisation requirements, the standardisation process pay more attention to available and planned resources.