A Software Reference Architecture for IoT-Based Healthcare Applications

With the Internet of Things (IoT), a myriad of connected things and the data captured by them is making possible the development of applications in various markets, such as transportation, buildings, energy, home, industrial and healthcare. Concerning healthcare, the development of these applications is expected as part of the future, since IoT can be the main enabler for distributed healthcare applications, having a significant potential to contribute to the overall decrease of healthcare costs while increasing the health outcomes. However, there are a lot of challenges in the development and deployment of this kind of application, such as interoperability, availability, usability and security. The complex and heterogeneous nature of the IoT-based healthcare applications makes its design, development and deployment difficult. It also causes an increase in the development cost, as well as an interoperability problem with the existing systems. To contribute to solve the aforementioned challenges, this paper aims to improve the understanding and systematization of the IoT-based healthcare applications' architectural design. It proposes a software reference architecture, named Reference Architecture for Healthcare (RAH), to systematically organize the main elements of IoT-based healthcare applications, its responsibilities and interactions, promoting a common understanding of these applications' architecture to minimize the challenges related to it.