Requirements for Adaptive Consumer Gateways in Residential Learning Healthcare Systems: Bringing Intelligence to the Edge

A gateway is a key component in residential healthcare systems. Enabling adaptability and applying intelligence to the gateway will promote residential healthcare systems to become Learning Healthcare Systems (LHSs) that can perform real-time decision making. This leads to the exciting potential of a new research field inconsumer-oriented gateways and consumer products that can adapt to the consumer’s healthcare needs, learn about the consumer, and over time can adapt accordingly. While consumer healthcare gateways exist, they have tended to be fixed on specific medical conditions and are not upgradeable or adaptive. To be able to create adaptive consumer gateways for consumer healthcare applications, this paper identifies a set of requirements concerning scalability, energy efficiency, reliability, availability, interoperability, and privacy that need to be fulfilled before any product or service can be created. Intervention in local data processing, local data storage, embedded data mining, security, interoperability, and configurability that serve the development process are also discussed. The goal of this paper isto provide the requirements for the innovation of a one-for-all smart adaptive consumer gateway in residential learning healthcare systems and to influence the consumer healthcare field to consider the benefits of moving to adaptive gateways for future developments.

I. Introduction

The Internet of Things (IoT) is developing at a rapid growth and being integrated into several Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions. IoT technology is increasingly being incorporated into healthcare systems, and widely achieving a growing acceptance in different aspects of daily life [1]. Presently, an evolution from hospital-centered healthcare systems to hospital-home-balanced healthcare systems is in its early stages aiming to become someday home-centered healthcare systems [2]. But for such an evolution to develop further, new technologies, system architectures, and computing paradigms are required. And, with the development of this evolution towards Learning Healthcare Systems (LHS), new challenges occur in system reliability, interoperability, low latency response, energy efficiency, mobility, security, and privacy become requirements to fulfill. This extension of healthcare boundaries outside the hospital settings, into the consumer domain, aims for the early detection and prevention of health deterioration and permitting consumers to live independently at home, allowing people with acute diseases and at-risk populations as senior adults to be continuously monitored and guided by healthcare providers [3], wardens or family members, and to receive advice on their healthcare.