Ontology-Driven IoT System for Monitoring Hypertension

Hypertension is a noncommunicable disease (NCD) that causes global concern, high costs and a high number of deaths. Internet of Things, Ubiquitous Computing, and Cloud Computing enable the development of systems for remote and real-time monitoring of patients affected with NCDs like hypertension. This paper reports on a system for monitoring hypertension patients that was built by employing these techniques. This system allows the vital signs of a patient (blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature) to be captured via sensors built in a wearable device similar to a wristwatch. These signals are transmitted to the patient's mobile device for processing, and the generated clinical data are sent to the cloud to be properly presented and analysed by the health professionals responsible for the patient. To deal with semantic interoperability issues that arise when multiple different devices and system components must interoperate, a semantic model was conceived for this system in terms of ontologies for diseases and devices. This paper also presents the semantic module that we developed and implemented in the cloud to perform reasoning based on this model, demonstrating the potential benefits of incorporating semantic technologies in our system.